A few years ago I recovered a time capsule: the diaries of my great-grandfather. I shared daily life with him when I was little and he was quite old. A family doctor, he lived through two world wars and the Spanish flu, among much other turbulence, yet his writings remain focused on nature. As he wrote in an entry during World War I:“While the cannon roar rumbles our windows, a robin is singing in the garden amidst a flock of long-tailed tits, marvelous purple-brown backs, and white heads with elegant black linings.” More than a century later I now enjoy the same birds, flowers, wines, meals, and sunshine that he did. Yet the world looks very different. When he started his diary, fishing boats on the river were powered by sails, and he traveled to see his patients in a cart pulled by a dog, made to his design by the local blacksmith (Figure 0.1). Soundscapes were untouched by the roar of machinery. There were four times fewer people on Earth, and their ecological footprints were small. Humans have radically changed the planet in just a few generations. The world feels as if we could be headed for trouble. Still, our emotional anchors in life seem deceptively solid. Fruit trees bloom, wine is wonderful, and a robin sings brilliantly.

Chapter 1 opens with a discussion of values, which frames the volume. It then reviews four well-known works/groups of work to introduce a debate about cultural ownership, beginning with the Bamiyan Buddhas, followed by Guernica, the Parthenon sculptures, and Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington.

We have discussed one abstract program implementing another. We now consider more carefully what that means. We write abstract programs with TLA formulas, and it is rather weird to talk about one formula implementing another. Computer scientists who view programs mathematically generally use the term refinement rather than implementation. Henceforth, we will use the two terms interchangeably.

Although Cypriot Syllabic was mostly used to write in Greek, it was sometimes used to write in an unknown indigenous language now conventionally called “Eteocypriot.” Many have wondered whether Eteocypriot could be a descendant of the language behind the earlier Cypro-Minoan script. In Chapter 11, Cypro-Minoan is analyzed against Linear A and Eteocypriot in an effort to determine whether any of them encode the same language. As a control, Cypriot Syllabic is analyzed against Linear B in the same way, with the results demonstrating an overwhelming probability that both scripts encode the same language (which we know they do, as both scripts are deciphered: they both encode Greek). Cypriot Syllabic is also analyzed against Linear A and Eteocypriot, demonstrating an overwhelming probability that none of them encode the same language—that is, that Linear A (for a fourth time) does NOT encode Greek, and neither does Eteocypriot. The analysis of Cypro-Minoan against Linear A and Eteocypriot, however, demonstrates a similarly overwhelming probability that (a) though Cypro-Minoan and Linear A clearly encode different languages, (b) Cypro-Minoan and Eteocypriot do encode the same language.

This conclusion discusses the legacy of Bildungsroman in contemporary Irish literature. It highlights Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody (1996) which portrays the social changes that transformed Ireland in the late twentieth century. It also discusses the official inquiries into clerical sexual abuse of children by Irish Catholic priests: The Ferns Report (2005), The Report by the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin (2009), commonly known as the Murphy Report and The Report by the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne (2011).

This book—an extensive and daring linguistic investigation into the languages underlying the undeciphered Bronze Age Aegean scripts—is unlike any other book that has ever been written on these scripts. The author tackles not just one of them, but all of them: Linear A, Cretan Hieroglyphic, the script on the Phaistos Disk, Cypro-Minoan, and Eteocypriot. The arguments and analyses are meticulously designed and highly credible. Best of all, the book is written in wonderfully clear English that virtually anyone can understand, and there is a substantial glossary of linguistic terms at the back of the book for readers to consult. The author formulates no fewer than fifty separate hypotheses about the nature of the languages underlying these scripts, and as identification of the language behind an undeciphered script is the most important key to its decipherment, this book constitutes a significant advance along the road to the decipherment of all five of these scripts. This book will be of the greatest interest not just to linguists, philologists, archaeologists, and ancient historians who specialize in these scripts, but also to all novices and aficionados of decipherment.

The Epilogue highlights the many contradictions around the existence of concubines in Republican China. The new civil code aimed to eliminate concubines. Yet concubines not only flourished but also became highly visible and controversial players in China’s rapidly evolving public sphere. Seen from the perspective of individual concubines’ lives, their status was complex: They lived in a state of flux that an “overall”argument cannot easily summarize. Each woman’s life was shaped by her specific situation and personal circumstances. Secondly, the Epilogue recapitulates the range of intertwined historical forces that the existing literature on efforts to abolish concubinage has largely overlooked. The increasing visibility and influence of women in Republican social and diplomatic functions is a topic deserving further study. Thirdly, it extends the discussion on the social wife to “wife diplomacy”in Mao’s era and contemporary China. Finally, it demonstrates that, during the Mao era, former concubines resurfaced in public and political spheres, though this time primarily as targets of re-education, political struggle, and persecution.

This chapter focuses on a few of the amateur films made in New England, a tiny fragment of the thousands of reels that survive in archives and attics throughout the United States and abroad. By examining a few of the amateur films, it also focuses on how the presence of the movie camera in various rural settings enabled people to both document and dramatise rural existence. In Maxim's hands, the amateur movie camera could enchant the rural as a place of magic, but it also showed how that enchantment was a property of a class. The chapter discusses four films, which offer a curious glimpse at how the rural appears as an imaginary site, a cinematic space where depictions of rural life are a product of the filmmakers' relationship to their subjects. The films are Snow White, Time Marches On, Movie Queen and Miss Olympia.

Cartoon sound begins with violence, or rather its threat. This assertion is evidenced by the Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s, whose soundtracks are emblematic of the genre. Within the terms of the contract between sound and image required by the film, there are a number of possible relationships that can order cinesonic audiovisuality. But significantly, what the cartoon genre presents are moments when sound and image echo to the same refrained moments of mickey-mousing. Of all aspects of cartoon music, the use of musical quotation is the best documented, particularly in terms of Carl Stalling's own approach to composition. The practice of scoring for cartoons, at least as it was done at Warner Bros. in the 1940s and 1950s, owes a great deal to the formal model of silent film accompaniment. It is significant that Stalling began his career as a silent film accompanist and orchestra leader.

This concluding chapter demonstrates the importance of communal leisure for deaf people and the way in which the exercise of choice in leisure past-times helped deaf people to affirm the positive aspects of their lives. This serves as a counter-argument to the perception of deaf people as disabled and needing help. This chapter reinforces the argument that the evidence of deaf leisure activities demonstrates that deaf people have been able to enjoy precisely the same types of social lives as their hearing contemporaries. The centrality of shared leisure provides ample evidence that deaf people actively sought the company of those with similar outlooks and life experiences as a way of celebrating their shared deafness, community and culture, rather than being drawn together because of notions of shared disability.

This chapter looks at the lives and careers of a selection of Public Security officials and employees of the Interior Ministry Police. It addresses the issues of how police personnel 'managed' and 'survived' the fascist establishment and how far ideological factors determined successful careers in the force. It needs to be stressed that the personal files of members of the Interior Ministry Police vary in the amount of material which they contain. As not infrequently happened to provincial police chiefs who fell out with the Party, at the end of 1935 Epifanio Pennetta was transferred to the Interior Ministry Police headquarters at Rome, where he was appointed Public Security Inspector. Edoardo Mezza's profile illustrates a seemingly less excitable 'first-hour' fascist who nevertheless encouraged an application of the regime's ideology to the police profession.

Chapter 5 deals with Linear A syntax (word order) and orthography (spelling). The chapter begins by comparing several examples of the so-called “offering formula,” a standardized string of words—most likely a dedicatory sentence—found on many ritual vessels, but a sentence that differs in subtle ways from vessel to vessel. I use the differences between the various examples of the “offering formula” to discern which words are most likely to be the subject, verb, and object of the sentence. This exercise indicates a high likelihood that the Minoan language is a verb-initial language (i.e., one in which the verb ordinarily comes first in the sentence), which in turn enables us to draw additional important conclusions about the Minoan language based on the way in which most verb-initial languages behave. The chapter ends with some observations about the apparent way in which the Minoans spelled words in Linear A, leading to the interesting conclusion that the spelling-rules they used in Central and Eastern Crete most closely align with the spelling-rules used in Linear B and Cypriot Syllabic, respectively, a conclusion that is backed up by archaeological evidence.

This chapter looks more closely at how the same interviewees can construct their experiences in more collective terms. It discusses how interviewees see and present themselves; their relationship to the country 'of origin'; language; attitudes to Islam and religiosity; and attitudes towards marriage and future marriage partners. The chapter focuses on a more cultural definition of community. All the interviewees acknowledge to varying degrees their cultural and/or linguistic 'heritage'. Language, that is, the mother tongues spoken by the interviewees' parents, informs a sense of collective cultural experience for several young people in the sample. Once again, the ways in which these interviewees discursively express their experiences of languages is heterogeneous. The chapter is concerned with the 'communautaire' pole of the 'triangle of identity,' focuses on the relationship between Islam, community and group unity.