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This Element presents a philosophical exploration of the concept of the 'model organism' in contemporary biology. Thinking about model organisms enables us to examine how living organisms have been brought into the laboratory and used to gain a better understanding of biology, and to explore the research practices, commitments, and norms underlying this understanding. We contend that model organisms are key components of a distinctive way of doing research. We focus on what makes model organisms an important type of model, and how the use of these models has shaped biological knowledge, including how model organisms represent, how they are used as tools for intervention, and how the representational commitments linked to their use as models affect the research practices associated with them. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Ethnic Identities in the Land of the Pharaohs deals with ancient Egyptian concept of collective identity, various groups which inhabited the Egyptian Nile Valley and different approaches to ethnic identity in the last two hundred years of Egyptology. The aim is to present the dynamic processes of ethnogenesis of the inhabitants of the land of the pharaohs, and to place various approaches to ethnic identity in their broader scholarly and historical context. The dominant approach to ethnic identity in ancient Egypt is still based on culture historical method. This and other theoretically better framed approaches (e.g. instrumentalist approach, habitus, postcolonial approach, ethnogenesis, intersectionality) are discussed using numerous case studies from the 3rd millennium to the 1st century BC. Finally, this Element deals with recent impact of third science revolution on archaeological research on ethnic identity in ancient Egypt.
Climate change is one of the most daunting global policy challenges facing the international community in the 21st century. This Element takes stock of the current state of the global climate change regime, illuminating scope for policymaking and mobilizing collective action through networked governance at all scales, from the sub-national to the highest global level of political assembly. It provides an unusually comprehensive snapshot of policymaking within the regime created by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), bolstered by the 2015 Paris Agreement, as well as novel insight into how other formal and informal intergovernmental organizations relate to this regime, including a sophisticated EU policymaking and delivery apparatus, already dedicated to tackling climate change at the regional level. It further locates a highly diverse and numerous non-state actor constituency, from market actors to NGOs to city governors, all of whom have a crucial role to play.
The sounds of Indian English are distinct and recognizable to outsiders, while insiders perceive variations in how English has developed in this large diverse population. What characteristics mark the unity? Which are clues to a speaker's origins or identity? This Element synthesizes research over the past fifty years and adds to it, focusing on selected features of consonants, vowels, and suprasegmentals (stress, intonation, rhythm) to understand the characteristics of Indian English accents and sources of its uniformity and variability. These accent features, perceptible by humans and discoverable by computational approaches, may be used in expressing identity, both local and pan-Indian.
This Element traces the effects of science's rise on the cultural status of monotheism. Starting in the past, it shows how monotheism contributed to science's rise, and how, returning the favour, science provided aid and support, until fairly recently, for the continuing success of monotheism in the west. Turning to the present, the Element explores reasons for supposing that explanatorily, and even on an existential level, science is taking over monotheism's traditional roles in western culture. These reasons are found to be less powerful than is commonly supposed, though the existential challenge can be made effective when framed in an unusual and indirect manner. Finally, the Element considers how the relationship between science's high standing and the status of monotheism might appear in the future. Could something like monotheism rise again, and might science help it do so? The Element concludes that an affirmative answer is possible.
European archaeologists in the last two decades have worked to integrate a wide range of emerging digital tools to enhance the recording, analysis, and dissemination of archaeological data. These techniques have expanded and altered the data collected by archaeologists as well as their interpretations. At the same time archaeologists have expanded the capabilities of using these data on a large scale, across platforms, regions, and time periods, utilising new and existing digital research infrastructures to enhance the scale of data used for archaeological interpretations. This Element discusses some of the most recent, innovative uses of these techniques in European archaeology at different stages of archaeological work. In addition to providing an overview of some of these techniques, it critically assesses these approaches and outlines the recent challenges to the discipline posed by self-reflexive use of these tools and advocacy for their open use in cultural heritage preservation and public engagement.
This exploration of the global structure of spacetime within the context of general relativity examines the causal and singular structures of spacetime, revealing some of the curious possibilities that are compatible with the theory, such as 'time travel' and 'holes' of various types. Investigations into the epistemic and modal structures of spacetime highlight the difficulties in ruling out such possibilities, unlikely as they may seem at first. The upshot seems to be that what counts as a 'physically reasonable' spacetime structure in modern physics is far from clear.
This Element provides an accessible introduction to ecosemiotics and demonstrates its pertinence for the study of today's unstable culture-nature relations. Ecosemiotics can be defined as the study of sign processes responsible for ecological phenomena. The arguments in this Element are developed in three steps that take inspiration from both humanities and biological sciences: 1) Showing the diversity, reach and effects of sign-mediated relations in the natural environment from the level of a single individual up the functioning of the ecosystem. 2) Demonstrating numerous ways in which prelinguistic semiotic relations are part of culture and identifying detrimental environmental effects that self-contained and purely symbol-based sign systems, texts and discourses bring along. 3) Demonstrating how ecosemiotic analysis centred on models and modelling can effectively map relations between texts and the natural environment, or the lack thereof, and how this methodology can be used artistically to initiate environmentally friendly cultural forms and practices.
This Element argues that although Kant's political thought does not tackle issues of global poverty and inequality head on, it nonetheless offers important conceptual and normative resources to think of our global socioeconomic duties. It delves into the Kantian duty to enter a rightful condition beyond the state and shows that a proper understanding of this duty not only leads us to acknowledge a duty of right to assist states that are unable to fulfil the core functions of a state, but also provides valuable hints at what just transnational trade relations and a just regulation of immigration should look like.
While local governments have traditionally been thought relatively powerless and unpolitical, this has been rapidly changing. Recent years have seen local governments jump headfirst into a range of so-called culture war conflicts like those concerning LGBTI rights, refugee protection, and climate change. Using the Australia Day and Columbus Day controversies as case studies, this Element rejuvenates research on how local governments respond to culture war conflicts, documenting new fronts in the culture wars as well as the changing face of local government. In doing this, this Element extends foundational research by advancing four new categories of responsiveness that scholars and practitioners can employ to better understand the varied roles local governments play in contentious culture war conflicts.
The discovery of artificial electromagnetic materials, called metamaterials, not only redefines the human perception of constitutive parameters in electromagnetic theory, but also brings forward new phenomena, such as negative refraction. We provide a comprehensive introduction to the unique characteristics of metamaterials, starting with Maxwell's equations and the kDB coordinate system, and moving through to theoretical concepts and design principles of negative refraction in metamaterials. For each kind of media, including isotropic, anisotropic and bianisotropic metamaterials, we discuss the characteristic waves and their properties. We show examples of negative refraction both theoretically and experimentally.
Voluntary societies and government initiatives stimulated the growth of reading communities in South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. A system of Parliamentary grants to establish public libraries in country towns and villages nurtured a lively reading culture. A condition was that the library should be open free-of-charge to the general public. This became one more reading space, and others included book societies, reading societies, literary societies, debating societies, mechanics institutes, and mutual improvement societies. This Element explains how reading communities used these spaces to promote cultural and literary development in a unique ethos of improvement, and to raise political awareness in South Africa's colonial transition to a Union government and racial segregation.
Global governance now provides people with recourse for harm through International Grievance Mechanisms, such as the Independent Accountability Mechanisms of the Multilateral Development Banks. Yet little is known about how such mechanisms work. This Element examines how IGMs provide recourse for infringements of three procedural environmental rights: access to information, access to participation, and access to justice in environmental matters, as well as environmental protections drawn from the United Nations Guiding Principles and the World Bank's protection standards. A content analysis of 394 original IAM claims details how people invoke these rights. The sections then unpack how the IAMs provide community engagement through 'problem solving', and 'compliance investigations' that identify whether the harm resulted from the MDBs. Using a database of all known submissions to the IAMs (1,052 claims from 1994 to mid-2019), this Element demonstrate how the IAMs enable people to air their grievances, without necessarily solving their problems.
The acquisition of the aspect is a central area in Second Language Acquisition research, the subject of hundreds of papers and dozens of edited volumes, monographs and special issues. This introduction provides the reader not only with a concise and plain presentation of the main hypotheses advanced in the past, but also with an overview of contemporary research. Stefano Rastelli shows how comparison of behavioural (production-comprehension), processing and statistical data is improving - and partially changing - our understanding of how learners acquire the aspectual distinctions of the target-language.
After 1951, the discourse surrounding both the Darmstadt courses in particular and European New Music more broadly shifted away from a dodecaphonic vocabulary in favour of concepts such as 'punctual music', 'post-Webern music', and 'static music', all collected under the newly-christened unity of the Darmstadt School. This study proposes a genealogy of the Darmstadt School through the institutional influence and writings of Herbert Eimert. It demonstrates that Eimert's understanding of music history - whereby technical procedures are universalised as the acme of historical progress - was adopted as the institutional discourse of New Music in Europe, and remains central to both textbook and critical scholarly accounts which attempt to make sense of the avant-garde after World War II.
Proving the existence of God is a perennial philosophical ambition. An armchair proof would be the jackpot. Ontological arguments promise as much. This Element studies the most famous ontological arguments from Anselm, Descartes, Plantinga, and others besides. While the verdict is that ontological arguments don't work, they get us entangled in fun philosophical puzzles, from philosophy of religion to philosophy of language, from metaphysics to ethics, and beyond.
This Element focuses on Latin American fossil fuel producer countries and how they are dealing with the transition towards a greener energy matrix. The challenges involved are multiple and ethical in substance. In particular, a worldwide expansion in clean energies would reduce climate change, physical risks. A rapid transition, however, induces the irruption of a new (financial) risk. The energy transition, in addition, could be thought of as a new arena for political disputes. Finally, it evaluates the relevance of monetary policy and financial regulation to tackle the issue from a macro perspective. Energy transition, however, have also long-term but uncertain consequences on the national economy. Henceforth, and in order to minimize risks, a long-term, strategic vision of the challenge confronted by the region becomes mandatory. To tackle all these problems, this Element profits from contributions of different disciplines.
The integrity of democratic elections, both in the United States and abroad, is an important problem. In this Element, we present a data-driven approach that evaluates the performance of the administration of a democratic election, before, during, and after Election Day. We show that this data-driven method can help to improve confidence in the integrity of American elections.
The concept of Anthropocene has been incorporated within a hegemonic narrative that represents 'Man' as the dominant geological force of our epoch, emphasizing the destruction and salvation power of industrial technologies. This Element develops a counter-hegemonic narrative based on the perspective of earthcare labour – or the 'forces of reproduction'. It brings to the fore the historical agency of reproductive and subsistence workers as those subjects that, through both daily practices and organized political action, take care of the biophysical conditions for human reproduction, thus keeping the world alive. Adopting a narrative justice approach, and placing feminist political ecology right at the core of its critique of the Anthropocene storyline, this Element offers a novel and timely contribution to the environmental humanities.
This Element explores interdisciplinarity in academic writing. It describes the ways in which disciplines interact when forming interdisciplinary fields and how language reflects (and is reflected by) these interactions. Specifically, bibliographical citations are investigated in corpora of research articles from three interdisciplines: Educational Neuroscience, Economic History, and Science and Technology Studies, as well as the single-domain disciplines from which they are derived. Comparisons are carried out between the interdisciplinary fields and between those fields and their related single-domain disciplines. The study combines analysis of quantitative data and qualitative interpretation by means of close reading. It concludes that bibliographical citations constitute a viable tool to explore interdisciplinary writing in the fields explored. The Element demonstrates that it is possible to describe epistemologically distinct types of interdisciplinarity by means of linguistic evidence.