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2523 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 109 of 127

The Chromium Isotope System as a Tracer of Ocean and Atmosphere Redox

The Chromium Isotope System as a Tracer of Ocean and Atmosphere Redox
  • Kohen W. Bauer, Noah J. Planavsky, Christopher T. Reinhard, Devon B. Cole
  • Published online:
    26 January 2021
    Print publication:
    25 February 2021
  • The stable chromium (Cr) isotope system has emerged over the past decade as a new tool to track changes in the amount of oxygen in earth's ocean-atmosphere system. Much of the initial foundation for using Cr isotopes (δ53Cr) as a paleoredox proxy has required recent revision. However, the basic idea behind using Cr isotopes as redox tracers is straightforward—the largest isotope fractionations are redox-dependent and occur during partial reduction of Cr(VI). As such, Cr isotopic signatures can provide novel insights into Cr redox cycling in both marine and terrestrial settings. Critically, the Cr isotope system—unlike many other trace metal proxies—can respond to short-term redox perturbations (e.g., on timescales characteristic of Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles). The Cr isotope system can also be used to probe the earth's long-term atmospheric oxygenation, pointing towards low but likely dynamic oxygen levels for the majority of Earth's history.
The Changing Dynamic of Government–Nonprofit Relationships

The Changing Dynamic of Government–Nonprofit Relationships
  • Advancing the Field(s)
  • Kirsten A. Grønbjerg, Steven Rathgeb Smith
  • Published online:
    23 January 2021
    Print publication:
    11 February 2021
  • We advance nonprofit scholarship by using the conceptual framework of policy fields to examine differences across nonprofit fields of activity. We focus on the structure of relationships among four sectors (government, nonprofit, market, informal) and how relationships differ across policy fields (here health, human services, education, arts and culture, and religion). The fields differ notably in the economic share that each sector holds and the functional division of labor among the sectors. Systemic differences also exist in how the nonprofit sector interacts with the government, market, and informal sectors. The policy fields themselves operate within national contexts of distinctive economic and political configurations. The framework explores how government-nonprofit relationships differ across policy fields, the factors responsible for this variation, and offers predictive capacity to generate hypotheses and research designs for additional research. We provide insights on how nonprofit organizations differ in key sub-fields with direct relevance for policy and practice.
Information Metamaterials

Information Metamaterials
  • Tie Jun Cui, Shuo Liu
  • Published online:
    23 January 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • Metamaterials have attracted enormous interests from both physics and engineering communities in the past 20 years, owing to their powerful ability in manipulating electromagnetic waves. However, the functionalities of traditional metamaterials are fixed at the time of fabrication. To control the EM waves dynamically, active components are introduced to the meta-atoms, yielding active metamaterials. Recently, a special kind of active metamaterials, digital coding and programmable metamaterials, are proposed, which can achieve dynamically controllable functionalities using field programmable gate array (FPGA). Most importantly, the digital coding representations of metamaterials set up a bridge between the digital world and physical world, and allow metamaterials to process digital information directly, leading to information metamaterials. In this Element, we review the evolution of information metamaterials, mainly focusing on their basic concepts, design principles, fabrication techniques, experimental measurement and potential applications. Future developments of information metamaterials are also envisioned.
Ecosemiotic Landscape

Ecosemiotic Landscape
  • A Novel Perspective for the Toolbox of Environmental Humanities
  • Almo Farina
  • Published online:
    22 January 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • The distinction between humans and the natural world is an artefact and more a matter of linguistic communication than a conceptual separation. This Element proposes ecosemiotics as an epistemological tool to better understand the relationship between human and natural processes. Ecosemiotics with its affinity to the humanities, is presented here as the best disciplinary approach for interpreting complex environmental conditions for a broad audience, across a multitude of temporal and spatial scales. It is proposed as an intellectual bridge between divergent sciences to incorporate within a unique framework different paradigms. The ecosemiotic paradigm helps to explain how organisms interact with their external environments using mechanisms common to all living beings that capture external information and matter for internal usage. This paradigm can be applied in all the circumstances where a living being (man, animal, plant, fungi, etc.) performs processes to stay alive.
The Virus Paradigm

The Virus Paradigm
  • A Planetary Ecology of the Mind
  • Roberto Marchesini
  • Translated by Sarah De Sanctis
  • Published online:
    21 January 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • In recent years, the word 'virus' has lost its biological perimeter of reference to acquire a much broader – could say 'paradigmatic' – meaning. The term 'virus' can be seen as a key word or an explanatory model also for processes that go beyond the infectious sphere. Every event appears to have a viral character: from the way information is transmitted to the processes of cultural globalization, from the impact of human beings on the planet to the subversion of ecosystems, from pandemic risks to the demographic increase on the planet. This seems to be indeed the Age of the Virus. Its model can be applied to most of the phenomena that characterize the twenty-first. Its profile – its looming and invisible nature, its ability to use other people's resources to spread and to transform into a dangerous doppelganger – is perfect to represent the fears of the contemporary age.
The Political Economy of Gulf Defense Establishments

The Political Economy of Gulf Defense Establishments
  • Zoltan Barany
  • Published online:
    21 January 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • The six monarchies on the Arabian Peninsula have devoted enormous sums to defense in past decades. Nevertheless, the gap between their expensive armaments and their capacity to deter aggression and/or project military strength has narrowed but little in that time. This Element takes a political economy approach and argues that structural factors inherent in the Gulf states' political systems prohibit civilian oversight of the defense sector and are responsible for this outcome. Lax restraints on military outlays, in turn, enable widespread corruption, lead to large-scale waste, and account for the purchasing of unneeded, unsuitable, and incompatible weapons systems. The Element explores the challenges caused by plummeting oil prices and the resulting budget cuts and considers the development of domestic defense industries in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, intended as a part of their economic diversification program. The setbacks of the Saudi-led coalition's on-going war in Yemen starkly illustrate the narrative.
Bluestockings and Travel Accounts

Bluestockings and Travel Accounts
  • Reading, Writing and Collecting
  • Nataliia Voloshkova
  • Published online:
    21 January 2021
    Print publication:
    25 March 2021
  • This Element proposes to relate the eighteenth-century world of travel and travel writing with the bluestocking salon. It locates eminent British travellers and explorers in the female-presided intellectual space and examines their multifaceted interaction with the bluestockings between 1760 and 1799. The study shows how the bluestockings acquired knowledge of the world through reading, discussing, writing and collecting travel accounts. It explores the 'social life' of manuscript and printed travel texts in the circle, their popularity and impact on the bluestockings. This Element builds upon the body of evidence provided by their published and unpublished diaries, correspondence and private library catalogues.
Child Welfare, Protection, and Justice

Child Welfare, Protection, and Justice
  • Murli Desai
  • Published online:
    21 January 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • This Element first reviews the limitations of the concepts of problems in childhood. It proposes a universal, comprehensive, and longitudinal conceptual framework of problems in childhood, their differential context, and their cyclical effects. Based on the linkages identified in the children's problems, they are divided into three levels, primary, secondary, and tertiary. The Element then reviews the concepts and the limitations of the prevalent service delivery approaches of child welfare, protection, and justice, because of which these services have not helped to break the cycle of problems in childhood. The Element identifies the rights-based comprehensive, preventive, and systemic approach for child welfare, at primary, secondary and tertiary prevention levels, in order to break this cycle of problems. Finally, the Element goes into details of the tertiary prevention level integrated service delivery for children facing socio-legal problems.
Nitrogen Isotopes in Deep Time

Nitrogen Isotopes in Deep Time
  • Colin Mettam, Aubrey L. Zerkle
  • Published online:
    21 January 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for life, and its sources and cycling have varied over earth history. Stable isotope ratios of nitrogen compounds (expressed as δ15N, in ‰) are preserved in the sedimentary record and track these changes, providing important insights into associated biogeochemical feedbacks. Here we review the use of nitrogen stable isotope geochemistry in unravelling the evolution of the global N cycle in deep time. We highlight difficulties with preservation, unambiguous interpretations, and local versus global effects. We end with several case studies illustrating how depositional and stratigraphic context is crucial in reliably interpreting δ15N records in ancient marine sediments, both in ancient anoxic (Archean) and more recent well oxygenated (Phanerozoic) environments.
Beckett's Intermedial Ecosystems

Beckett's Intermedial Ecosystems
  • Closed Space Environments across the Stage, Prose and Media Works
  • Anna McMullan
  • Published online:
    21 January 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • This Element draws on the concept of ecosystems to investigate selected Beckett works across different media which present worlds where the human does not occupy a privileged place in the order of creation: rather Beckett's human figures are trapped in a regulated system in which they have little agency. Readers, listeners or viewers are complicit in the operation of techniques of observation inherent to the system, but also reminded of the vulnerability of those subjected to it. Beckett's work offers new paradigms and practices which reposition the human in relation to space, time and species.
Comparative Thinking in Biology

Comparative Thinking in Biology
  • Adrian Currie
  • Published online:
    20 January 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • Biologists often study living systems in light of their having evolved, of their being the products of various processes of heredity, adaptation, ancestry, and so on. In their investigations, then, biologists think comparatively: they situate lineages into models of those evolutionary processes, comparing their targets with ancestral relatives and with analogous evolutionary outcomes. This element characterizes this mode of investigation - 'comparative thinking' - and puts it to work in understanding why biological science takes the shape it does. Importantly, comparative thinking is local: what we can do with knowledge of a lineage is limited by the evolutionary processes into which it fits. In light of this analysis, the Element examines the experimental study of animal cognition, and macroevolutionary investigation of the 'shape of life', demonstrating the importance of comparative thinking in understanding both the power and limitations of biological knowledge.
Echinoderm Morphological Disparity: Methods, Patterns, and Possibilities

Echinoderm Morphological Disparity: Methods, Patterns, and Possibilities
  • Bradley Deline
  • Published online:
    20 January 2021
    Print publication:
    11 February 2021
  • The quantification of morphology through time is a vital tool in elucidating macroevolutionary patterns. Studies of disparity require intense effort but can provide insights beyond those gained using other methodologies. Over the last several decades, studies of disparity have proliferated, often using echinoderms as a model organism. Echinoderms have been used to study the methodology of disparity analyses and potential biases as well as documenting the morphological patterns observed in clades through time. Combining morphological studies with phylogenetic analyses or other disparate data sets allows for the testing of detailed and far-reaching evolutionary hypotheses.
Backsliding

Backsliding
  • Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World
  • Stephan Haggard, Robert Kaufman
  • Published online:
    19 January 2021
    Print publication:
    11 February 2021
  • Assaults on democracy are increasingly coming from the actions of duly elected governments, rather than coups. Backsliding examines the processes through which elected rulers weaken checks on executive power, curtail political and civil liberties, and undermine the integrity of the electoral system. Drawing on detailed case studies, including the United States and countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, the book focuses on three, inter-related causal mechanisms: the pernicious effects of polarization; realignments of party systems that enable elected autocrats to gain legislative power; and the incremental nature of derogations, which divides oppositions and keeps them off balance. A concluding chapter looks at the international context of backsliding and the role of new technologies in these processes. An online appendix provides detailed accounts of backsliding in 16 countries, which can be found at www.cambridge.org/backsliding.
Psychology at the Intersections of Gender, Feminism, History, and Culture

Psychology at the Intersections of Gender, Feminism, History, and Culture
  • Alexandra Rutherford
  • Published online:
    18 January 2021
    Print publication:
    11 February 2021
  • Psychologies of women and gender have developed - both institutionally and intellectually - within distinct social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. In many cases, feminism has played an important role in catalyzing disciplinary engagements with gender and culture as categories of analysis and sites of theorizing rather than solely as variables defining groups to be compared. The intersections of gender, feminism, history, and culture are explored with reference to psychology, first in the United States, and then across three other national contexts. This exploration reveals the similarities and tensions between and among the approaches to studying culture and the approaches to studying gender, that psychologists have employed. It also reveals the historically - and culturally - contingent nature of psychologies of women and gender, and, by extension, of gender itself.
The Stratigraphic Paleobiology of Nonmarine Systems

The Stratigraphic Paleobiology of Nonmarine Systems
  • Steven Holland, Katharine M. Loughney
  • Published online:
    18 January 2021
    Print publication:
    04 February 2021
  • The principles of stratigraphic paleobiology can be readily applied to the nonmarine fossil record. Consistent spatial and temporal patterns of accommodation and sedimentation in sedimentary basins are an important control on stratigraphic architecture. Temperature and precipitation covary with elevation, causing significant variation in community composition, and changes in base level cause elevation to undergo predictable changes. These principles lead to eight sets of hypotheses about the nonmarine fossil record. Three relate to long-term and cyclical patterns in the preservation of major fossil groups and their taphonomy, as well as the occurrence of fossil concentrations. The remaining hypotheses relate to the widespread occurrence of elevation-correlated gradients in community composition, long-term and cyclical trends in these communities, and the stratigraphic position of abrupt changes in community composition. Testing of these hypotheses makes the stratigraphic paleobiology of nonmarine systems a promising area of investigation.
Unity of Science

Unity of Science
  • Tuomas E. Tahko
  • Published online:
    18 January 2021
    Print publication:
    11 February 2021
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  • Unity of science was once a very popular idea among both philosophers and scientists. But it has fallen out of fashion, largely because of its association with reductionism and the challenge from multiple realisation. Pluralism and the disunity of science are the new norm, and higher-level natural kinds and special science laws are considered to have an important role in scientific practice. What kind of reductionism does multiple realisability challenge? What does it take to reduce one phenomenon to another? How do we determine which kinds are natural? What is the ontological basis of unity? In this Element, Tuomas Tahko examines these questions from a contemporary perspective, after a historical overview. The upshot is that there is still value in the idea of a unity of science. We can combine a modest sense of unity with pluralism and give an ontological analysis of unity in terms of natural kind monism. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Reading Computer-Generated Texts

Reading Computer-Generated Texts
  • Leah Henrickson
  • Published online:
    18 January 2021
    Print publication:
    11 February 2021
  • Natural language generation (NLG) is the process wherein computers produce output in readable human languages. Such output takes many forms, including news articles, sports reports, prose fiction, and poetry. These computer-generated texts are often indistinguishable from human-written texts, and they are increasingly prevalent. NLG is here, and it is everywhere. However, readers are often unaware that what they are reading has been computer-generated. This Element considers how NLG conforms to and confronts traditional understandings of authorship and what it means to be a reader. It argues that conventional conceptions of authorship, as well as of reader responsibility, change in instances of NLG. What is the social value of a computer-generated text? What does NLG mean for modern writing, publishing, and reading practices? Can an NLG system be considered an author? This Element explores such question, while presenting a theoretical basis for future studies.
The Method of Hypothesis and the Nature of Soul in Plato's <I>Phaedo</I>

The Method of Hypothesis and the Nature of Soul in Plato's Phaedo
  • John Palmer
  • Published online:
    15 January 2021
    Print publication:
    11 February 2021
  • This study of Plato's Phaedo promotes better understanding of its arguments for the soul's immortality by showing how Plato intended them, not as proofs, but as properly dialectical arguments functioning in accordance with the method of hypothesis. Unlike the argument for the soul's immortality in the Phaedrus, which does seem intended as a proof, the Phaedo arguments are proceeding toward the first principles that could serve as the basis for a proof - the most important being an account of the soul's own essential nature. This study attends to the substantial progress the Phaedo makes toward such an account. It also considers Socrates' epistemic situation in the dialogue and the problem of whether his confidence in the face of death is misplaced if his arguments have not been proofs before considering how the concluding myth draws together several of the dialogue's main themes.
The Empire at the Opéra

The Empire at the Opéra
  • Theatre, Power and Music in Second Empire Paris
  • Mark Everist
  • Published online:
    14 January 2021
    Print publication:
    21 January 2021
  • Although nineteenth-century legislation had tried to ensure a precise separation between genre and institution for Parisian music in the theatre, it had inadvertently laid out a field on which the politics of genre could be played out as agents and actors of all types deployed various forms of artistic power. During the Second Empire, from 1854 until 1870, the state took over day-to-day control of the Opéra in ways that were without precedent. Every element of the Opéra's activity was subjugated to the exigency of Empire; the selection or artists, works and more general questions of artistic policy were handed over to politicians. The Opéra effectively became a branch of government. The result was a stagnation of the Opéra's repertory, and beneficiaries were the composers of larger-scale works for competing organisations: the Opéra Comique and the Théâtre Lyrique.
Aboriginal Writers and Popular Fiction

Aboriginal Writers and Popular Fiction
  • The Literature of Anita Heiss
  • Fiannuala Morgan
  • Published online:
    14 January 2021
    Print publication:
    11 February 2021
  • Wiradjuri woman, Anita Heiss, is arguably one of the first Aboriginal Australian authors of popular fiction. A focus on the political characterises her chick lit; and her identity as an author is both supplemented and complemented by her roles as an academic, activist and public intellectual. Heiss has discussed genre as a means of targeting audiences that may be less engaged with Indigenous affairs, and positions her novels as educative but not didactic. Her readership is constituted by committed readers of romance and chick lit as well as politically engaged readers that are attracted to Heiss' dual authorial persona; and, both groups bring radically distinct expectations to bear on these texts. Through analysis of online reviews and surveys conducted with users of the book reviewing website Goodreads, I complicate the understanding of genre as a cogent interpretative frame, and deploy this discussion to explore the social significance of Heiss' literature.

Page 109 of 127