Empire State Research Articles

Politico-Architectonic Philosophy as Place Building in Albany, New York, U.S.A.

Governmental complexes vary in their urbanistic conceptions. Many exhibit grandiose visions intended to create strong feelings in the minds and hearts of those who visit and work within their inner-bowels. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the conception, design, planning, construction and long-term plausibility of the Empire State Plaza (ESP) in Albany, New York. It is hypothesized that the ESP represents the radicalization of a vision, the materialization of a governmental utopia, and the memorialization of a skyline not timely appropriated by Albanians and New Yorkers. ESP’s long-term plausibility is questioned from its place-making characteristics, completeness and extent of the impacts of its redevelopment, and tangible results from urbanity and humane perspectives. It is argued that ESP’s politico-architectonic gestures are individual statements as much as collective appropriations of immaterial values connected to (1) the redevelopment of the city’s CBD, (2) images of a fully functioning state apparatus, and (3) the desire to centralize most state agencies within a specific place.

Ultrametricity increases the predictability of cultural dynamics

A quantitative understanding of societies requires useful combinations of empirical data and mathematical models. Models of cultural dynamics aim at explaining the emergence of culturally homogeneous groups through social influence. Traditionally, the initial cultural traits of individuals are chosen uniformly at random, the emphasis being on characterizing the model outcomes that are independent of these (‘annealed’) initial conditions. Here, motivated by an increasing interest in forecasting social behavior in the real world, we reverse the point of view and focus on the effect of specific (‘quenched’) initial conditions, including those obtained from real data, on the final cultural state. We study the predictability, rigorously defined in an information-theoretic sense, of the social content of the final cultural groups (i.e. who ends up in which group) from the knowledge of the initial cultural traits. We find that, as compared to random and shuffled initial conditions, the hierarchical ultrametric-like organization of empirical cultural states significantly increases the predictability of the final social content by largely confining cultural convergence within the lower levels of the hierarchy. Moreover, predictability correlates with the compatibility of short-term social coordination and long-term cultural diversity, a property that has been recently found to be strong and robust in empirical data. We also introduce a null model generating initial conditions that retain the ultrametric representation of real data. Using this ultrametric model, predictability is highly enhanced with respect to the random and shuffled cases, confirming the usefulness of the empirical hierarchical organization of culture for forecasting the outcome of social influence models. These results appear to be highly independent of the empirical data source.

New York, New York: The Empire State of Mind

This paper aims at reading the two songs entitled New York , New York and The Empire State of Mind to see how the city of New York is perceived and campaigned by the songs. It is an American popular cultural studies research discussing the two songs which are analysed as popular media works to deliver messages to the audiences. Inge’s theory on popular cultural works is employed to examine the form, function, and methods of evaluation in a way that the songs are treated as readable cultural texts. Semiotics is also employed as a relevant approach to interpret the data. In addition, Socio-cultural approach is applied in this study by considering American history that is useful to have a deeper discussion to examine how the city of New York is defined and spread by the media through the songs. The finding shows that the two popular songs see New York as a representation of America to hold the values of finding dreamland, conquering the wilderness, and achieving individual success in a modern materialistic capitalistic America. Released in two different eras, the songs are functioned as media voicing the American thoughts and feeling toward New York City as the today’s place of dream and reshaping the society itself as well. Keywords: New York, America, popular culture, media works, song.

DA POLIS GREGA AOS JOGOS SEM FRONTEIRAS: CINCO NOTAS SOBRE O ESPAÇO NA POLÍTICA EUROPEIA

O presente artigo compara as formas políticas da polis grega, do Império e do Estado moderno. A partir desta comparação, defende-se que se trata de pensartambém uma quarta forma política, a qual eclode no século XX sob configurações quer democráticas quer totalitárias, nas suas possibilidades e limites.

Do political incentive affects China's land transfer in energy-intensive industries?

In the paper, we mainly investigate why China's local governments tend to undermine the rule of central government in restriction of land transfer for energy-intensive industries (EIIs). Built on the standard political economic literature, we hypothesise that political promotion incentive for the local secretary (measured by age and tenure), the de facto “first-in-command” official, regarding rapid economic development, which is encouraged by the existing cadre evaluation system, lead to poor performance of local government in terms of energy and the environment. The empirical results state that being closer to the age of 57 and having spent more than 4 years in office significantly enhance the secretary's promotion incentive, which in turn spurs the local government to provide more land for EII projects, even at the expense of environmental degradation, and the results hold across several robustness tests. Thus, we suggest that more weight be given to environment-related indicators in the cadre evaluation system, and the newly introduced lifelong accounting system for the ecological environment should be implemented effectively.

Is attending a mental process?

The nature of attention has been the topic of a lively research programme in psychology for over a century. But there is widespread agreement that none of the theories on offer manage to fully capture the nature of attention. Recently, philosophers have become interested in the debate again after a prolonged period of neglect. This paper contributes to the project of explaining the nature of attention. It starts off by critically examining Christopher Mole's prominent “adverbial” account of attention, which traces the failure of extant psychological theories to their assumption that attending is a kind of process. It then defends an alternative, process‐based view of the metaphysics of attention, on which attention is understood as an activity and not, as psychologists seem to implicitly assume, an accomplishment. The entrenched distinction between accomplishments and activities is shown to shed new light on the metaphysics of attention. It also provides a novel diagnosis of the empirical state of play.

Improved potential energy surface and spectral assignments for ammonia in the near-infrared region

A new ‘spectroscopic’ potential energy surface (PES) for 14NH3 has been generated by refinement of a high accuracy ab initio PES to experimental data. The quality of the PES is reflected in the excellent agreement between calculated rovibrational energy levels and the empirical values of MARVEL. The PES is used in conjunction with two different DMSs to generate room temperature line lists up to 12 000 and 20 000 cm−1, including all transitions from lower states up to 4000 cm−1, with total angular momentum up to J=20. Several strong bands are found to be missing from HITRAN 2016 in the 5700–6200 cm−1 region. Using the line lists, 769 transitions in the 7400–8000 cm−1 are assigned by ground state combination difference (GSCDs), along with empirical upper state energies and full quantum labels for 284 levels. 53 of our assignments were found to disagree with those given in HITRAN 2016.

Constructing the Literate Child in the Library: An Analysis of School Library Standards

I examine one set of elementary school library standards (New York City School Library System, n.d.) in an effort to analyze the impact that the standards might have on literacy experiences for young children in one urban school setting. Employing a critical discourse analysis framework, I examine the language that the Empire State Information Fluency Continuum uses to privilege certain kinds of knowledge construction. Focusing on the descriptions of knowledge, inquiry, and informational literacy constructed by the standards, I argue that the Information Fluency Continuum perpetuates notions of literacy and inquiry that are linear and hierarchical. I argue that educator conceptions of inquiry, engagements with texts, and social responsibility practices must be widened. Rather than expecting students to follow a sequential set of steps, libraries might be a space where students are given agency to decide when and how they would engage in literacy and pursue inquiries.

Obitelj-dijete-škola

The paper deals with certain aspects of the family background of upper classes pupils in a primary school in Split. Some of the basic moments of parental socio-economic status and general social milieu are illustrated as well. Specific qualities of interactions developed in these contexts between parents and their children are dealt with in particular. The empirical state "recorded" by a questionnaire at the begining of 1996 is presented in its entirety. It can be generally concluded that our young people establish a close relation between love - health - happiness - welfare. The four-item correlation seems to be a sort of motto to most of them. Within social relations, school as an institution and teachers as incumbents of the teaching process are not isolated factors, in spite of general claims as to on their passiveness. Most empirical findings inspire us with optimism and hope for a better future but at the same time they confirm an understanding that there does not exist any enclosed social area free of any kind of problems.

Recentering U.S. Empire: A Structural Perspective on the Color Line

In the past 20 years, scholars of top sociology and race and ethnicity articles increasingly have mentioned the term “color line.” Prominent among them are sociologists concerned with how incoming waves of Latin American and Asian immigration, increasing rates of intermarriage, and a growing multiracial population will affect the U.S. racial order. While much of this work cites Du Bois, scholars stray from his definition of the color line in two ways. First, they characterize the color line as unidimensional and Black–white rather than as many divisions between non-white people and whites. Second, scholars portray the color line as the outcome of microlevel factors rather than the product of international geopolitical arrangements. I contend that in contrast to scholarship that portrays immigrants and intermarried and multiracial people as shifting the color line, international and imperial policies related to immigration, intermarriage, and multiracial identification are longstanding sites of the construction of the U.S. racial order. Scholars should conceptualize the United States as an empire state in order to analyze the international political history of multiple color lines. In doing so, they can distinguish between differences in kind and degree of racial divisions.

Equity, Inclusion, and Beyond: Today’s Urban Chief Diversity Officer

This paper, based primarily on the author’s perspective as president of SUNY Empire State College, will explore the need for and means of leveraging the chief diversity officer’s role in creating an equitable and inclusive environment within the distributed world that is Empire State College’s “campus” and, specifically, within SUNY Empire’s urban environments. Empire State College fills a unique role in today’s higher-education landscape. It was founded in 1971 by Ernest Boyer, then the chancellor of the State University of New York, to make education accessible outside the confines of traditional curricular and delivery structures, and to better meet the needs of New Yorkers with locations, academic programming, and student services responsive to diverse communities and learners. Today, Empire State College continues to embrace and fulfill that mission, with individualized education as its cornerstone and nearly 18,000 undergraduate and graduate students in 34 academic centers around the state of New York, in several countries overseas and online around the world. The vast majority of its undergraduate students have attended at least one previous institution, are employed, and are likely to have family and dependent-care obligations. The college is purposefully nonresidential, designed to be where our students live and work. Students can choose structured or individualized academic programs, depending on discipline, and have the options of classroom-based, online, or independent study, as well as weekend residencies, or a hybrid of education delivery via these modes.

Intimate Navigations, Refracted Perspectives

Intimate Navigations, Refracted Perspectives

Intentional Forgetting in Organizations: The Importance of Eliminating Retrieval Cues for Implementing New Routines.

To cope with the already large, and ever increasing, amount of information stored in organizational memory, “forgetting,” as an important human memory process, might be transferred to the organizational context. Especially in intentionally planned change processes (e.g., change management), forgetting is an important precondition to impede the recall of obsolete routines and adapt to new strategic objectives accompanied by new organizational routines. We first comprehensively review the literature on the need for organizational forgetting and particularly on accidental vs. intentional forgetting. We discuss the current state of the art of theory and empirical evidence on forgetting from cognitive psychology in order to infer mechanisms applicable to the organizational context. In this respect, we emphasize retrieval theories and the relevance of retrieval cues important for forgetting. Subsequently, we transfer the empirical evidence that the elimination of retrieval cues leads to faster forgetting to the forgetting of organizational routines, as routines are part of organizational memory. We then propose a classification of cues (context, sensory, business process-related cues) that are relevant in the forgetting of routines, and discuss a meta-cue called the “situational strength” cue, which is relevant if cues of an old and a new routine are present simultaneously. Based on the classification as business process-related cues (information, team, task, object cues), we propose mechanisms to accelerate forgetting by eliminating specific cues based on the empirical and theoretical state of the art. We conclude that in intentional organizational change processes, the elimination of cues to accelerate forgetting should be used in change management practices.

The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across some 30,000 pages of statutes is a daunting task. By adapting methods of digital text analysis to observe text reuse in legal sources, this article provides a methodological guide to show how the evolution of law can be studied at a macro level — across many codes and jurisdictions — and at a micro level — regulation by regulation. Applying these techniques to the Field Code and its emulators, we show that by a combination of creditors’ remedies the code exchanged the rhythms of agriculture for those of merchant capitalism. Archival research confirmed that the spread of the Field Code united the American South and American West in one Greater Reconstruction. Instead of just a national political development centered in Washington, we show that Reconstruction was also a state-level legal development centered on a procedure code from the Empire State of finance capitalism.

Pre-Zika Microcephaly in Brazil: Closer to the Elusive Baseline and New Questions Raised.

As the world learned of the emerging Zika virus outbreak in Brazil in 2015 and of the astutely identified association with microcephaly, questions quickly arose regarding the dramatic increase in reported microcephaly and the level of risk to pregnant women. There were 2 overarching questions at that time: how large was the increase in the incidence of microcephaly in Brazil, and how much of it could be attributed to Zika virus? Appropriate concern regarding this new association abounded, along with questions regarding whether increased awareness may have led to increased reporting. Initial assessments were further compounded by comparison with a pre-Zika baseline that relied on a passive surveillance system with likely significant underreporting.1,2 Further complicating the situation was the lack of an internationally accepted, standardized approach to the measurement and definition of microcephaly, making comparisons of rates across regions and time periods difficult. Although several advances in the response to Zika virus required the use of cutting-edge technologies (eg, diagnostic advances, vaccine development), these urgent, first, and overarching questions that arose during the Zika virus … Address correspondence to Elizabeth Dufort, MD, Division of Epidemiology, New York State Department of Health, Corning Tower Room 503, Empire State Plaza, Albany, NY 12237. E-mail: elizabeth.dufort{at}health.ny.gov

Současné politické konflikty v oblasti Afrického rohu

Violent conflict is very old in human society. The development of military technology brought with itself the worst tragedies loss of human live and material devastation in the second half of 20th century in the Horn of Africa. This region is one of the centers of various political violent conflicts in the world, according to length of these violent conflicts, the number of death of people, mainly civilian, refugees and internal displaced persons (IDP). This study elucidates the root causes of long wars in the Horn of Africa focusing mainly on South Sudan and Somalia. It also illustrates how the Super Powers during the Cold War helped their client states to prolong the suffering of people in the region. When Socialist system disappeared from Eastern Europe, Mengistu Haile Mariam’s and Siyad Barre’s regime ignominiously collapsed. In Ethiopia Amhara power elite, who ruled the Empire state from 1889 to 1991 lost their state power and Tigrian guerrilla fighters captured it through the power of the gun, Eritrea gained its independence from Ethiopia, South Sudan is emerging from long heinous war to independence. The violent conflict in Somalia transformed after the old regime demise in 1991 and the new leaders unable to build new central government. Somalia is fragmented and became the good example of failed state in the theory of contemporary political sociology. The paper tries to explain these complex violent conflicts in this part of Africa.

Intergenerational Justice Today

AbstractA theory of intergenerational justice consists in the study of the moral and political status of the relations between present and past or future people, more specifically, of the obligations and entitlements they can potentially generate. The challenges that justify talking about responsibilities between generations are myriad (e.g., the amount of public debt that is fair to incur; the funding of future pensions; reparations for past wrongs; climate change). And the disputes they prompt can focus on the past just as much as on the present, even though the fact that the human species has reached a state of technological progress that enables it to have an irredeemable impact on the planet and perhaps even endanger future human existence tends to make concerns about the future more pressing. Debates on intergenerational justice are twofold. The first revolves around the issue of whether claims of justice across generations whose members' lifetimes do not necessarily overlap could be justified. And the second revolves around the specific conception of justice in play, that is, around the nature of the standard that must be applied as well as around the identification of the contents of the duties that present generations supposedly have vis‐à‐vis past or future generations. This survey article depicts the conceptual and argumentative framework in which these debates are set. It aims to outline certain of the main features shared by the most influential contemporary theories of intergenerational justice, and the problems inherent in them. It concludes by suggesting that, even though the idea of succeeding generations is merely an abstraction, there are specific empirical states of affairs that require different theoretical responses to intergenerational justice.

Initiating Mass Movement: Questions of Commercial Information in Atlantic Migration from Central Europe, 1870–1900

Abstract This paper examines the potential role of commercial information in explaining the sudden acceleration of Atlantic migration from central Europe around 1880. Drawing on examples from German Europe, and new theoretical frameworks regarding decision making, it questions assumptions held in migration macro theory that have marginalized commercial information in motivating migration decisions. Specifically, it examines this issue at the onset stages of movement. In light of this discussion, it recognizes the advantages of examining commercial material in European archives, particularly those of the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which may help advance historical knowledge of one of the major nineteenth-century shifts in Atlantic movement.

Старообрядческие браки в контексте государственно-конфессиональной политики Российской Империи на территории Томской губернии в XIX в.

Старообрядческие браки в контексте государственно-конфессиональной политики Российской Империи на территории Томской губернии в XIX в.

Evidence for Mixed Rationalities in Preference Formation

Understanding the mechanisms underlying the formation of cultural traits is an open challenge. This is intimately connected to cultural dynamics, which has been the focus of a variety of quantitative models. Recent studies have emphasized the importance of connecting those models to empirically accessible snapshots of cultural dynamics. In particular, it has been suggested that empirical cultural states, which differ systematically from randomized counterparts, exhibit properties that are universally present. Hence, a question about the mechanism responsible for the observed patterns naturally arises. This study proposes a stochastic structural model for generating cultural states that retain those robust empirical properties. One ingredient of the model assumes that every individual’s set of traits is partly dictated by one of several universal “rationalities,” informally postulated by several social science theories. The second, new ingredient assumes that, apart from a dominant rationality, each individual also has a certain exposure to the other rationalities. It is shown that both ingredients are required for reproducing the empirical regularities. This suggests that the effects of cultural dynamics in the real world can be described as an interplay of multiple, mixing rationalities, providing indirect evidence for the class of social science theories postulating such a mixing.