Systematic Rejection Research Articles

Yoga and the “Pure Muhammadi Path” of Muhammad Nasir ‘Andalib

This article addresses the question of how early modern Sufis dealt with yoga. Some scholars have argued that a movement of Sufi reform occurred in South Asia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, representing a shift towards legal Islam, which would call for the rejection of non-Islamic practices. This explanation overlooks the rhetorical construction of Sufi claims of spiritual status and shari‘a legitimacy, and it fails to distinguish eighteenth-century examples from the very different reform movements created in the nineteenth century in response to European colonialism. This article considers as a case study Nala-yi ‘Andalib (“The Nightingale’s Lament”), the central text produced by the pre-colonial founder of the “pure Muhammadi path”, Muhammad Nasir ‘Andalib (d. 1758), with the help of intertextual references to the masterpiece of his son, Khwaja Mir Dard (d. 1785), ‘Ilm al-Kitab (“Knowledge of the Book”). The consequence of their evaluation of yoga was not the systematic rejection of non-Islamic practices, but a guarded acknowledgement of their efficacy within a framework that used Indic references as a straw man for intra-Islamic debates.

Isolation of Responsive Elements of Planar Multi-Element Photodiodes

In the mass production of multi-element silicon p-i-n photodiodes, the problem of systematic rejection of products due to a decrease in the insulation resistance between the active elements of photodetectors has been revealed. The purpose of this work is to study the causes of insulation resistance degradation and to establish optimal methods for avoiding this phenomenon. A comparative analysis of three insulation methods was carried out: classical insulation by the surface of a non-conductive substrate and a dielectric layer; insulation by means of mesaprofile grooves with a dielectric film; insulation by means of areas of limitation of surface leakage channels isotypic with the substrate material (in this case, p+-type) formed in the gaps between active elements. The study found that the reason for the deterioration of the insulation resistance between the active elements of photodiodes is the presence of conductive inversion channels at the Si-SiO2 interface due to the use of silicon with high resistivity. One mechanism for the formation of inversion channels is the redistribution of impurities in the masking oxide (in particular, phosphorus) and their diffusion to the interface during thermal operations. Another mechanism for the formation of inversion layers is the diffusion of boron from silicon into SiO2 during heat treatment due to the fact that the boron segregation coefficient is less than one. In the manufacture of samples with insulation using non-conductive areas of the substrate, a decrease in insulation resistance was observed as the technological route was performed (after each subsequent operation, the resistance degraded). The degree of degradation can be reduced by reducing the duration of thermal operations. It has been shown that reducing the thickness of the masking oxide causes a decrease in insulation resistance. When using mesa-technology, it is possible to increase the insulation resistance by eliminating the high-temperature oxidation operation and, in fact, due to the absence of a masking coating during phosphorus deposition. Insulation by means of p+-type areas in the gaps between the active elements allows to obtain the highest insulation resistance values. The formation of these regions with a width of 100 μm in the gaps with a width of 200 μm allowed us to obtain an insulation resistance of 25-30 MΩ. To ensure the insulation of the active elements of photodiodes by this method, two thermal operations are added to the technological route. The number of thermal operations can be reduced by doping the entire silicon surface with a low boron concentration before forming a masking coating.

The multi-mode acoustic gravitational wave experiment: MAGE

The Multi-mode Acoustic Gravitational wave Experiment (MAGE) is a high frequency gravitational wave detection experiment. In its first stage, the experiment features two near-identical quartz bulk acoustic wave resonators that act as strain antennas with spectral sensitivity as low as 6.6 × 10−21 [strain]/Hz\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\\sqrt{\ ext {Hz}}$$\\end{document} in multiple narrow bands across MHz frequencies. MAGE is the successor to the initial path-finding experiments; GEN 1 and GEN 2. These precursor runs demonstrated the successful use of the technology, employing a single quartz gravitational wave detector that found significantly strong and rare transient features. As the next step to this initial experiment, MAGE will employ further systematic rejection strategies by adding an additional quartz detector such that localised strains incident on just a single detector can be identified. The primary goals of MAGE will be to target signatures arising from objects and/or particles beyond that of the standard model, as well as identifying the source of the rare events seen in the predecessor experiment. The experimental set-up, current status and future directions for MAGE are discussed. Calibration procedures of the detector and signal amplification chain are presented. The sensitivity of MAGE to gravitational waves is estimated from knowledge of the quartz resonators. Finally, MAGE is assembled and tested in order to determine the thermal state of its new components.

New EoR power spectrum limits from MWA Phase II using the delay spectrum method and novel systematic rejection

ABSTRACT We present an analysis of Epoch of Reionization (EoR) data from Phase II of the Murchison Widefield Array using the simpleds delay spectrum pipeline. Prior work analysed the same observations using the fhd/εppsilon imaging pipeline, and so the present analysis represents the first time that both principal types of 21 cm cosmology power spectrum estimation approaches have been applied to the same data set. Our limits on the 21 cm power spectrum amplitude span a range in k space of $|k| \lt 1 \, h_{100}\, {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$ with a lowest measurement of Δ2(k) ≤ 4.58 × 103 mK2 at $k = 0.190\, h_{100}\, \rm {Mpc}^{-1}$ and z = 7.14. In order to achieve these limits, we need to mitigate a previously unidentified common mode systematic in the data set. If not accounted for, this systematic introduces an overall negative bias that can make foreground contaminated measurements appear as stringent, noise-limited constraints on the 21 cm signal amplitude. The identification of this systematic highlights the risk in modelling systematics as positive-definite contributions to the power spectrum and in ‘conservatively’ interpreting all measurements as upper limits.

Drifting to the top? Disentangling mechanisms influencing the turnover rate of popular music

ABSTRACT What causes turnover on the Billboard charts? The neutral model of cultural evolution, which assumes that taste is transmitted via an unbiased copying process, provides precise predictions regarding expected popularity distributions and turnover within a popularity-ranked list. Recent advances in this line make it possible to characterize the likelihood of music taste transmission mechanisms by investigating departures of observed turnover rates from neutral model predictions. Here, I bias the neutral model to investigate four alternative conceptions of individual music taste transmission (song quality, individual status, social network, and anticonformist) and use agent-based simulations to examine the impact on turnover. I then compare modeled with empirical turnover data from the Billboard Hot 100 over the period from 1958 to 2021 and find that observed turnover patterns are reproduced only in an anticonformist model simulating the systematic rejection of the most popular songs. This finding was unexpected and challenges the notion of a generalized “preference for the popular.” Overall, this study contributes to ongoing debates regarding the mechanisms involved in the transmission of taste and the mechanics of fashion change.

Fuga e ritorno: Italian-Canadian Narratives

Many Italian-Canadian authors have been stimulated to explore their dual identity after a return trip to Italy. They confront the myth of nostalgia as an emotional blind-spot to the harsh realities of past miseria and present-day conflicts in Italian society. Women writers such as Mary di Michele, Caterina Edwards, Licia Canton and Rina Cralli are particularly critical of the position of women in Italy and the whole nostalgia sentimentality promoted by Italian popular culture and music. Pasquale Verdicchio’s whole writing career has been a systematic rejection of the thematics of nostalgia.

HOW ECONOMISTS ENTERED THE ‘NUMBERS GAME’: MEASURING DISCRIMINATION IN THE US COURTROOMS, 1971–1989

The paper explores why and how economists entered the courtrooms as expert witnesses in employment discrimination cases in the US. The main sources are published legal decisions. I analyze the courts’ and economists’ discourses on the use of a specific method: multiple regression analysis in relation to litigation history, academic debates, and the institutional settings of expertise within the courts. I first show how the early reception of the method in the late 1970s did not involve systematic rejection from the courts but rather a large amount of skepticism. I then illustrate how economic theory underlying the method was progressively introduced in the “judicial tool kit” and how the debates in the courtrooms relate to the debates in academia in the 1980s. By 1989, practical and ethical questions regarding the institutional settings of experts’ testimony took center stage, reflecting the increasing professionalization of forensic economics.

The (un)promised land: queer identity and South Africa’s post-apartheid urban landscape

In this article, I explore the intersection of photography and contemporary urban topographies in the production of queer identity in post-apartheid South Africa. To do so I examine Thebeautifulonesarehere, a contemporary photo-collage portrait series by Kelebogile Ntladi, which attempts to queer representations of South African cityscapes to reveal the entrenched homophobia and the systematic rejection of queer subjects. Ntladi, inspired by their own experiences of counter-normativity and the omnipresent threat of violence they face as a result, took to the streets to walk through their home city of Johannesburg to photograph the urban and cultural landscape; these photographic prints were then used as the building blocks in the assembly and fabrication of imagined spaces in which they and their fellow queer citizens would be able to live without fear of violence, where they could move freely and without repercussion. Using the trope of the flâneur as a starting point, I draw on Walter Benjamin’s paradoxical experience of Paris: his writing of Paris as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ and ‘the promised land’ of the flâneur exists in stark juxtaposition with his own complex experience of anxiety, dislocation and impending doom while living in the city while in exile during World War II. Ntladi’s personal experience of post-1994 Johannesburg echoes the paradoxical experience.

Quantitative historical linguistics: A corpus framework by Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray

Reviewed by: Quantitative historical linguistics: A corpus framework by Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray Dirk Geeraerts Quantitative historical linguistics: A corpus framework. By Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiii, 229. ISBN 9780198718178. $88 (Hb). The early twenty-first century has witnessed a major shift toward quantitative approaches in the methodology of linguistics. Specifically, whereas quantitative methods have long been a staple of sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research, the past two decades have seen their expansion toward descriptive and theoretical grammar. In usage-based approaches to language in particular, like cognitive and probabilistic linguistics, a ‘quantitative turn’ has occurred that applies the statistical testing of hypotheses to data derived from text corpora. The central inspiration for Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray’s book is the observation that this turn toward quantitative corpus studies has not yet penetrated historical linguistics to the same extent as some other subfields of linguistics. It accordingly sets out to introduce ‘the framework for quantitative historical linguistics’. The seven chapters fall roughly into two parts. In Chs. 1 to 3, a general argumentation in support of quantitative historical linguistics is developed, whereas Chs. 4 to 7 deal with the implementation of the ensuing program. The discussion of ‘why’ thus leads naturally to a discussion of ‘how’. Two threads run through the first part of the text: a specification of the kind of quantitative historical linguistics that the authors intend to propagate, and an argumentation in favor of the model in question. Important features of this argumentation are a description of the actual situation in historical linguistics and a conceptual defense of the approach against potential objections. Organizationally, Ch. 1 introduces both threads, Ch. 2 develops the first thread, and Ch. 3 the second. With regard to the first thread, the first chapter introduces the authors’ notion of quantitative research in historical linguistics by means of a double contrast. On the one hand, quantitative research differs from the conventional use of evidence in historical linguistics that rests on example-based categorical judgments about the existence of specific linguistic phenomena but does not look into probabilistic, distributional data about trends of variation and change of the phenomenon in question. On the other hand, quantitative historical research needs to go beyond raw frequencies, in the sense that the multidimensional nature of language requires a multivariate statistical approach. In the second chapter, this conception is further developed in terms of the distinction between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches. Whereas the former turn to corpora primarily for illustration and confirmation, the latter use corpus data at two stages of the empirical process: corresponding to the distinction between exploratory and confirmatory statistics, quantitative distributional evidence is initially used to generate hypotheses, and subsequently for testing them. With regard to the second thread, the text provides quantitative data (appropriately, one could say) to the effect that such a method is less entrenched in historical linguistics than other fields of linguistics. This argumentation rests on a comparison of the 2012 volume of Language with six journals with a (not necessarily unique) focus on language change, such as Diachronica, Folia Linguistica Historica, and Language Variation and Change. As an explanation for the observation that historical linguistics seems to be lagging behind, the book invokes early negative experiences with glottochronology, plus the influence of structuralist and generative theories (though this is of course a factor that is not specific to historical linguistics). At the same time, it is demonstrated how the rise of quantitative linguistics goes hand in hand with the growing availability of electronic corpus materials—a trend that obviously creates an opportunity for historical linguistics just as for the other branches of linguistics. [End Page 190] Next to the ‘the time is ripe, we shouldn’t lag behind’ argument, the plea for quantitative corpus research in historical linguistics includes a ‘nothing is wrong with it’ type of argumentation, in the form of a systematic rejection of potential objections. Section 3.7 skillfully refutes counterarguments from convenience, from redundancy, from scope limitations, from principle, and from pseudoscience. Crucially, it is argued that a quantitative approach is not incompatible with a categorial...

Kinshipwrecking: John Smith’s adoption and the Pocahontas myth in settler ontologies

John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) canonized a settler colonial narrative activity that I call kinshipwrecking—a conventional mode of storytelling that destroys and moves to supplant traditional Indigenous kinship structures and obligations. Smith’s archetypal refusal of Indigenous kinship is arguably the most important element of his text, and yet it has been treated as an afterthought in most previous scholarship. His Historie depicts the process of colonization as a war between English patriarchal governance and Indigenous kinship systems—the latter of which are portrayed as power structures that must be infiltrated (through alliance or adoption) and exploited by the English and destroyed/transformed from within. The colony Smith wrote about is today remembered as the first permanent English settlement on Turtle Island, and Settlers in what some now call Canada and the USA continue to live their lives within the legacy of Smith’s archetypal and systematic rejection of Indigenous kinship. Using Mattaponi oral history as a counter narrative that both challenges and contextualizes Smith’s in/famous tale, this article considers the Settler mythology of Pocahontas and Wahunsenaca (Powhatan) through the lens of Indigenous customary or traditional adoption practices.

Chemical warfare in Colombia, evidentiary ecologies andsenti-actuandopractices of justice

Between 1994 and 2015, militarized aerial fumigation was a central component of US-Colombia antidrug policy. Crop duster planes sprayed a concentrated formula of Monsanto's herbicide, glyphosate, over illicit crops, and also forests, soils, pastures, livestock, watersheds, subsistence food and human bodies. Given that a national peace agreement was signed in 2016 between FARC-EP guerrillas and the state to end Colombia's over five decades of war, certain government officials are quick to proclaim aerial fumigation of glyphosate an issue of the past. Rural communities, however, file quejas (complaints or grievances) seeking compensation from the state for the ongoing effects of the destruction of their licit agro-forestry. At the interfaces of feminist science and technology studies and anthropology, this article examines how evidentiary claims are mobilized when war deeply politicizes and moralizes technoscientific knowledge production. By ethnographically tracking the grievances filed by small farmers, I reveal the extent to which evidence circulating in zones of war - tree seedlings, subsistence crops, GPS coordinates and bureaucratic documents - retains (or not) the imprints of violence and toxicity. Given the systematic rejection of compensation claims, farmers engage in everyday material practices that attempt to transform chemically degraded ecologies. These everyday actualizations of justice exist both alongside and outside contestation over the geopolitically backed violence of state law. Rather than simply contrasting everyday acts of justice with denunciatory claims made against the state, farmers' reparative practices produce an evidentiary ecology that holds the state accountable while also ' senti-actuando' (feel-acting) alternative forms of justice.

Invisible minimalism

AbstractThis essay attempts a rapprochement between Kent Bach’s view on semantic minimalism and the most radical version of contextualism about language on offer: Charles Travis’s occasion-sensitivity. Despite common assumptions held by defenders of semantic literalism – which cast Bach’s proposal as a form of contextualism – Bach rejects all conceivable forms of contextualism. In this paper, I argue that in spite of his systematic rejection of contextualism, Bach’s position bears a striking resemblance to Travis’s occasion-sensitivity. Further, when analyzed in light of the conceptual framework developed by Travis, Bach’s strand of minimalism can be shown to contain a deep-rooted conceptual inconsistency to the extent that he aims to ascribe “pure semantic content” to a linguistic entity that is necessarily pragmatic.

First intercomparison among laboratories involved in COST Action-TU1301 “NORM4Building”: Determination of natural radionuclides in ceramics

This work describes the outcomes of the COST Action-TU1301 “NORM4Building” intercomparison on the determination of natural radioactivity in ceramics. Twenty-two laboratories involved in the intercomparison are evaluated for their performance using robust statistics. The reference values of 226Ra (214Bi and 214Pb) are determined to be 122 ± 11 Bq kg−1 and 124 ± 14 Bq kg−1, respectively and in secular equilibrium in the uranium chain while the reference values of 232Th (228Ac) is determined to be 61 ± 6 Bq kg−1 and that of 40K was determined to be 955 ± 40 Bq kg−1. Although the aim of the exercise was to determine the activity concentration of 226Ra, 232Th and 40K and evaluation of the “Activity Concentration Index”, laboratories were asked to report complete characterization of natural radionuclides. The results of this exercise pointed out a good performance among laboratories since the percentage of the acceptable results were above 90% for the radionuclides of interest. Based on these results, considering the systematic rejection of the results reported from a few laboratories we emphasize the need for quality control procedures.

L’esthétique de Nietzsche. Au croisement de l’identité allemande

In this paper, Rony Klein aims to inscribe Nietzsche’s Aesthetics in the German tradition, constituted by the names of Martin Luther and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and through his relation to Wagner. In that purpose, he begins with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as born from Wagnerism. In 1870, Wagner praises Beethoven, in his book of this title, as a “German hero” who liberated German music from its “decline” in French and Italian conventions. Wagner designates music as the German art, i.e. a protestant art, rooted in interiority. In The Birth of Tragedy, two years later, Nietzsche himself affirms with pride that German music, from Luther’s Choral through Bach and Beethoven and until Wagner, is the rebirth of Greek Dionysian spirit. This thesis is paradoxical in that sense that Luther seems to Nietzsche more “Greek” than Winckelmann, the father of German Hellenism, accused of having misunderstood the Tragic Greek culture. Thus, according to this idea, the modern German music inherits the Dionysian Greeks. The whole argument is totally reversed by Nietzsche after Human All-Too Human, which marks a turning-point in his Aesthetics. Schopenhauer and Wagner are abandoned, as well as the ancient Metaphysics of music, in which music was the privileged art. Nietzsche now opposes Romantic and Greek Aesthetics one to each other, and his new approval of Greek Art and Culture signifies now the systematic rejection of German Aesthetics represented by the “Romantic” Wagner. German art, especially music, accused of ignoring style, i.e. clarity, grace and elegance, is opposed to Greek sense of limits and love of forms. In Modern Times, French Culture is praised as the incarnation of style and art of writing. Nietzsche also praises classic music as the capacity to make us dance, i.e. to move with grace and elegance, whereas with Wagner’s music, we only “float and swim”. In this sense, the opposition of Carmen, Bizet’s opera, to Wagner operas, is the last word of Nietzsche’s Aesthetics, and the total reversion of his first German Aesthetics.

Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World par by Gary Wilder

Reviews 255 societal attitudes toward the various facets of men’s and women’s experience of the conflict. On these foundations, Simon-Carrère has written a book that is not only informative, but also very readable. While the content of the book is worth the attention of any scholar of French culture and society of the First World War, its stylistic readability makes the book accessible to a less specialized readership as well. Ohio University Christopher Coski Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8223-5850-3. Pp. 384. $26.30. Wilder’s book is not only a must-read text for those who are interested in critical theory and intellectual history, but also an insightful inquiry with great scholarly depth.Among numerous critical approaches, Freedom Time can be read as a romantic vision of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s aesthetics and politics. Wilder’s investigations aim at showing these thinkers’unapologetic desire to stay within and to defend a reformed French empire as an alternative to national independence. The book is a rereading of Césaire and Senghor’s literary writings that informs their political actions and ideologies during the postwar time and beyond. Wilder’s main thesis, as the title of the book seems to imply, refutes the old paradigms that equated “colonial emancipation to national liberation and self-determination to state sovereignty” (4). Wilder legitimately re-questions the concept of freedom which is at the center of this inquiry. Inspired by critical theorists like Theodor Adorno,W.E.B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, Frederic Cooper, Wilder seems to sympathize with Césaire and Senghor’s epistemological posture in that national liberation is not conducive to human emancipation, and self-determination does not necessarily require state sovereignty as antinomies of freedom. According to a certain federalist wave that has received Wilder’s support, nation-state appears to be an accidental occurrence in light of past millennia of kingship and imperial system. This historical perspective became the rationale for Freedom Time, and Wilder succeeds through a thorough study of Césaire and Senghor’s political actions and literary works. But their pragmatic utopian visions of self-determination with state sovereignty can only be grasped or understood in light of their distinctive orientation to anti-colonialism as Wilder convincingly argues (7). Despite Césaire and Senghor’s disillusionment with their quest for integration into and acceptance by France’s imperial nation,“working through empire and unthinking France had characterized their public lives by their systematic rejection of being others and their appropriation of Frenchness as they claimed to be the rightful insiders of “radical traditions of French politics and thought” (7). Wilder shows that Césaire and Senghor, in the tradition of Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher, redefined decolonization as a process of reconfiguring France’s imperial domination rather than ending it completely. By challenging so-called European universalism, Freedom Time reminds us that these Antillean and African thinkers’ scholarship is an invitation to deterritorialize social thought, to decolonize intellectual history and to approach modernity as a global process that belongs to humanity through“historical constellations” (13). In brief, what links all nine chapters of Freedom Time is the way Wilder masterfully applies the concept of “untimeliness”as a pedagogical tool to undo the concept of anachronism or to make it obsolete. Therefore, “the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous” event is always at work (40). Although Wilder fails to reassert the exceptional character of Haitian slaves’emancipation (or any other slaves’ revolts) as ontologically justified and their unfinished national independence inevitable, his book is a compelling epistemological intervention to rethink our relationship to the past and reevaluate all universal claims. South Plainfield High School (NJ) Claudy Delné Zielonka, Jan. Is the EU Doomed? Madden, MA: Polity, 2014. ISBN 978-0-745683973 . Pp. 128. $10. Topoi of apocalyptic doom have been with us since time immemorial. If anyone still thinks that their specter has deserted our times, all they have to do is read Zielonka’s book. For the author, the occasion for the resurgence of this particular topos lies in the...

Karol Wojtyla: el surgimiento de una vocación a indagar por la verdad del hombre

El incesante retorno de Karol Wojtyla al estudio del hombre y la defensa de la dignidad de la persona no son hechos producto del azar o del mero interés del pensador, sino que son resultado de la experiencia del fenómeno del totalitarismo durante el transcurso de la Segunda Guerra Mundial; además, sufrió todo el desprecio de la barbarie nazi y la posterior llegada del comunismo a su nación; estas “ideologías del mal” como él las llamó, dan cuenta de la naturaleza verdadera y radical del mal, del olvido del otro y de la desestimación sistemática por la vida humana. Este artículo es una descripción del ejercicio de poder y dominación ejecutados concretamente por Adolf Hitler a Polonia durante el paso de la guerra por ese país, tierra natal del Papa. El objeto de estudio es la comprensión, en términos de causalidad, del pensamiento de Wojtyla: personalismo y humanismo cristiano; los términos “totalitarismo”, “geopolíica”, “personalismo” y la figura de Hitler son esenciales. Los pensadores no se hacen solos, su temperamento es fruto del contexto en el que vivieron. En este análisis, para hacer más fina esa comprensión pretendida, son citados otros autores que han ampliado el horizonte de comprensión sobre el fenómeno citado, por ejemplo Hannah Arendt y Joan Carles Mélich.

Keynes, Steindl, and the Critique of Austerity Economics

Austerity is now ’in fashion,” as governments respond to the revenue shortfalls of the crisis through deficit reduction plans and fiscal stability pacts, and economists blame it on the profligate spending of households and countries. Consumers, they say, bought houses they could not afford and countries consumed more than they produced, while loose monetary policies made this spending possible. Governments ’got prices wrong,” keeping interest rates too low for too long, and while increases in government spending might alleviate current employment problems, this deficit spending is inflationary, and in any case will not help in the long run as budget deficits raise interest rates, ’crowding out” business and household spending. It is as if we have stepped back in time, to the depression years of the 1930s, when monetary theories of the cycle were dominant, the ’overinvestment” of the boom blamed for the downturn, and effective fiscal actions proposed by Keynes and others blocked by preoccupation with the public debt and its burdens.… The analysis here is concerned with the systematic rejection of Keynes’s and Kalecki’s revolution in economics and the resurrection of Say’s Law (supply creates its own demand) of pre-Keynesian economics in all but name—a view that underlies today’s austerity economics. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Science Denial and the Science Classroom

Biology teachers are accustomed to engaging individuals who do not accept biological evolution. Denial of evolution ranges from ignorance of the evidence to outright denial or distortion of data. The list of science denial topics has grown alarmingly over the years to include: HIV as the cause of AIDS, exaggeration of the health and environmental risks of genetically modified organisms, existence of holes in the ozone layer, the rise in antibiotic resistance, health risks caused by cigarette smoking, exaggeration and denial of harmful side effects of pesticides, water and environmental damage caused by hydraulic fracturing, the fear that vaccines do more harm than good, and, of course, global warming and climate change. Teaching climate science has become so perilous in some school districts that the National Center for Science Education, long known for activism in the arena of evolution education, has greatly expanded efforts in the arena of climate (http://ncse.com/climate).

A political economy model of road pricing

In this paper, we use a simple majority voting model to study the introduction of urban congestion tolls. The model allows for different types of uncertainty and considers different uses of the toll revenues. The following results are obtained. First, we show that individual uncertainty with respect to modal substitution costs may imply that a majority votes against road pricing ex ante, although a majority would have been in favor after its introduction ex post. Moreover, if a majority is against road pricing ex ante, there will also be no majority for organizing an experiment that would take away the individual uncertainty. Second, political uncertainty with respect to the use of the revenues corroborates the finding that ex ante more voters will be against the introduction of tolls. Third, both types of uncertainty suggest that fewer voters are against road pricing when toll revenues are used to subsidize public transport than when they are redistributed to all voters. Importantly, the results of this paper are consistent with a number of recent empirical observations on efforts to introduce road pricing, including the systematic rejection of road pricing in referenda, the more favorable attitudes towards road pricing after than before its introduction, and tying the toll revenues to support public transport.

Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méélièès's ““Trip to the Moon””, Matthew Solomon (ed.)

Reviewed by: Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès's "Trip to the Moon." David Levy Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès's "Trip to the Moon." Edited by Matthew Solomon (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011). This anthology of essays devoted to Georges Méliès's 1902 motion picture sensation Le Voyage dans la Lune makes it clear how much the assessment of Méliès has changed. That may be the volume's chief value. On the other hand, the essays do not tell us all that much we did not already know about the man's work; key essays by Paolo Cherchi Usai, Thierry Lefebvre and André Gaureault are not new. Perhaps a fantastical idea in 1902, the original tale of a voyage to the moon as a "nowhere land" appears to have been True History, the work of a second-century Syrian author writing in Greek, Lucian of Samosata. In mid January 1898, The New York Journal began publication of a serialization entitled "Edison's Conquest of Mars". Was the illustrated firecracker-shaped rocket approaching the faraway red planet featured in the first installment the inspiration for the Méliès space ship? Responding to the reality of a range of prints in black and white and color tints, and of different lengths, Paolo Cherchi Usai urges that we treat each print as an entity unto itself and not seek definitiveness. And Richard Abel tells us that as a consequence of a range of dubious - though by no means unique - practices, many members of the film's large original American audience had no idea of the identity of its French creator, associating it with the Edison studio. The invitation to pronounce on the famous movie granted contributors license to revisit an older question: what did Georges Méliès have to do with the emergence of the edited narrative? The answer: little if anything. In a reversal of what had been a cliché of early cinema history, the Méliès opus is now regarded as pre-cinema. This is a point reinforced in part by the deliberately backward-looking perspective of many of the essays. The illusionism of the féerie - Méliès's evident debt to the litterateurs Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and to Jacques Offenbach's 1875 "fairy-opera" La Voyage dans la lune - are now regarded as having had virtually nothing to do with what cinema became. Victoria Duckett offers a reading of Méliès's manipulation of female presence in Voyage that draws on Laura Mulvey's appropriation of Jacques Lacan's concept of the gaze. Having lost its one-time enormous audience, the gaze the film itself now attracts is the gaze of the specialist in aesthetic and historical contemplation examining a museum piece. The essays conclude with a citation by Viva Paci of words from Georges Franju's hommage in Le Grand Méliès (1953): "... I think perhaps you understand now why without Georges Méliès this movie and many others could never have been made". But in context this is a sentiment at odds with the anthology's larger unspoken hypothesis about the severe limits of the Frenchman's influence, no longer hailed as the great inspiration of Edwin Porter and D.W. Griffith. Murray Pomerance finds in each of Voyage's scenes "a dreamlike condensation" of abstract [End Page 349] distances, which makes a point not unrelated to Tom Gunning's now familiar claim that the work of Méliès represented a pre-narrative "cinema of attractions." Seizing on the Gunning claim, André Gaudeault has proposed that we understand the Méliès moonshot as sui generis, i.e. as a species of kine-attractography rather than as a stage, however primitive, in the evolution of the edited narrative: "Our task is to convince ourselves that the fundamental point of rupture in film history was not the invention of the moving picture camera in the 1890s (the Kinetograph, the Cinematograph) but rather the constitution of the institution 'cinema' in the 1910s, an institution whose first principle was a systematic rejection of the ways and...