From the Preface: The purpose of this book is to
explain the Western's popularity. While the Western itself may seem
simple (it isn't quite), an explanation of its popularity cannot
be; for the ...Western, like any myth, stands between individual human
consciousness and society. If a myth is popular, it must somehow
appeal to or reinforce the individuals who view it by communicating
a symbolic meaning to them. This meaning must, in turn, reflect the
particular social institutions and attitudes that have created and
continue to nourish the myth. Thus, a myth must tell its viewers
about themselves and their society. This study, which takes up the
question of the Western as an American myth, will lead us into
abstract structural theory as well as economic and political
history. Mostly, however, it will take us into the movies, the
spectacular and not-so-spectacular sagebrush of the cinema. Unlike
most works of social science, the data on which my analysis is
based is available to all of my readers, either at the local
theater or, more likely, on the late, late show. I hope you will
take the opportunity, whenever it is offered, to check my findings
and test my interpretations; the effort is small and the rewards
are many. And if your wife, husband, mother, or child asks you why
you are wasting your time staring at Westerns on TV in the middle
of the night, tell them firmly-as I often did-that you are doing
research in social science.
Conducts a discrete choice experiment among civil servants and democratically elected decision makers in New Zealand, in which the information presented to participants was manipulated to determine ...the effect of monetary value information on the preferences of practitioners, using an urban land use decision context for the choice experiment. Investigates whether providing explicit monetary information, as opposed to non-monetary information such as cultural impacts, affects respondents’ economic and/or environmental decision making. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
We develop an algorithm for computing the solution of a large system of linear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with polynomial inhomogeneity. This is equivalent to computing the action of a ...certain matrix function on the vector representing the initial condition. The matrix function is a linear combination of the matrix exponential and other functions related to the exponential (the so-called
ϕ
-functions). Such computations are the major computational burden in the implementation of exponential integrators, which can solve general ODEs. Our approach is to compute the action of the matrix function by constructing a Krylov subspace using Arnoldi or Lanczos iteration and projecting the function on this subspace. This is combined with time-stepping to prevent the Krylov subspace from growing too large. The algorithm is fully adaptive: it varies both the size of the time steps and the dimension of the Krylov subspace to reach the required accuracy. We implement this algorithm in the
matlab
function phipm and we give instructions on how to obtain and use this function. Various numerical experiments show that the phipm function is often significantly more efficient than the state-of-the-art.
Introduction
Trophic cascades can produce important effects on a community where some species may have strong effects on other parts of the community up, down the food chain, or both. Top predators ...are often controlled from the bottom-up by the abundance of their prey base while prey animals are often controlled from the top-down. Studies of trophic interactions in the tropics suggest that the trophic chains are longer because of the high productivity; and because of the high diversity there is abundant intraguild redundancy which results in weak interactions.
Methods
We studied the effect of bottom-up forces affecting the population of green Anaconda (
Eunectes murinus
) in the Venezuelan llanos; looking at net primary productivity, precipitation, and the abundance of an important prey item, Capybara (
Hydrochaeris hydrochaeris
).
Results
Our data show a strong interaction of these variables on the percentage of Anacondas that reproduce in a given year (here forth breeding ratio). In particular Capybara abundance has a strong effect. Capybara abundance itself is also under strong bottom-up influence determined by precipitation and Net Primary Productivity.
Discussion
These strong interactions are not what is expected from a tropical ecosystem. We also found an unexpected strong influence of precipitation and primary productivity on Anaconda breeding ratio not related to the abundance of Capybara, likely affecting abundance of other prey or affecting non-trophic variables. This later evidence supports the notion that there is redundancy in tropical food chains and, strong as the effect of Capybara abundance might be, Anacondas do not entirely rely on them.
Recently, a great deal of attention has been focused on the construction of exponential integrators for semilinear problems. In this article we describe a MATLAB
1
package which aims to facilitate ...the quick deployment and testing of exponential integrators, of Runge--Kutta, multistep, and general linear type. A large number of integrators are included in this package along with several well-known examples. The so-called φ functions and their evaluation is crucial for accuracy, stability, and efficiency of exponential integrators, and the approach taken here is through a modification of the scaling and squaring technique, the most common approach used for computing the matrix exponential.
There is growing interest in gene editing farm animals. Some alterations could benefit animal welfare (e.g., improved heat tolerance in cattle with the “slick” gene), the environment (e.g., reducing ...methane emissions from cattle with induced pluripotent stem cells), and productivity (e.g., higher weight gains in cattle with the “double muscling” gene). Existing scholarship on the acceptability of such modifications has used myriad approaches to identify societal factors that shape the ethics and governance of this technology. We argue that integrating historical approaches—particularly from the relatively new and burgeoning field of animal history—offers a form of “anticipatory knowledge” that can help guide discussions on this topic. We conducted a systematic review of the animal history literature in English, German, and Spanish to identify the influence of political, scientific, economic, social, and cultural factors on the development and acceptance of such technologies. We identified analogous structures and fault lines in past debates about farm animals that provide insights for contemporary discussions about gene editing. Those analogous structures include the market power of meatpackers or the racialized precepts in livestock breeding, and fault lines, like the disconnect between states and citizens over the direction of food systems. Highlighting these similarities demonstrates how external forces have shaped—and will continue to shape—the acceptance or rejection of emerging biotechnologies as applied to farm animals.
Proponents of the Anthropocene epoch posit that human activities now powerfully influence the Earth's governing systems. Many environmental scholars have offered alternative concepts for this new ...geologic epoch to challenge its outward anthropocentrism and tendency to flatten the diversity of the world's people into a single planetary humanity. But in doing so, these critiques distort a more distributive and systemic understanding of agency. This article suggests that geophysical agency offers historians a more useful and precise conceptual term for interpreting connections among human ideas and actions, material systems, and geologic change. One way that human undertakings have functioned geologically has been by moving earth and inscribing asphalt over an extended chronology of the Great Acceleration. Examining 1930s highway construction in Colorado's Big Thompson Canyon offers a window into some of the historical processes that have defined geophysical agency.
From the Preface: The purpose of this book is to explain the Western's popularity. While the Western itself may seem simple (it isn't quite), an explanation of its popularity cannot be; for the ...Western, like any myth, stands between individual human consciousness and society. If a myth is popular, it must somehow appeal to or reinforce the individuals who view it by communicating a symbolic meaning to them. This meaning must, in turn, reflect the particular social institutions and attitudes that have created and continue to nourish the myth. Thus, a myth must tell its viewers about themselves and their society. This study, which takes up the question of the Western as an American myth, will lead us into abstract structural theory as well as economic and political history. Mostly, however, it will take us into the movies, the spectacular and not-so-spectacular sagebrush of the cinema. Unlike most works of social science, the data on which my analysis is based is available to all of my readers, either at the local theater or, more likely, on the late, late show. I hope you will take the opportunity, whenever it is offered, to check my findings and test my interpretations; the effort is small and the rewards are many. And if your wife, husband, mother, or child asks you why you are wasting your time staring at Westerns on TV in the middle of the night, tell them firmly--as I often did--that you are doing research in social science. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977. From the Preface:
The purpose of this book is to explain the Western's popularity. While the Western itself may seem simple (it isn't quite), an explanation of its popularity cannot be; for the Western, like any myth, stands between individual human consc.
The Wild West Wright, Will
2001, 2001-06-18, 20010101
eBook
This book, written by the author of the celebrated volume Six Guns and Society, explains why the myth of the Wild West is popular around the world. It shows how the cultural icon of the Wild West ...speaks to deep desires of individualism and liberty and offers a vision of social contract theory in which a free and equal individual (the cowboy) emerges from the state of nature (the wilderness) to build a civil society (the frontier community). The metaphor of the Wild West retained a commitment to some limited government (law and order) but rejected the notion of the fully codified state as too oppressive (the corrupt sheriff). Compelling and magnificently suggestive, the book unpacks one of the core icons of our time.
We discuss the issues involved in an efficient computation of the price and sensitivities of Bermudan exotic interest rate derivatives in the cross-currency displaced diffusion LIBOR market model. ...Improvements recently developed for an efficient implementation of the displaced diffusion LIBOR market model are extended to the cross-currency setting, including the adjoint-improved pathwise method for computing sensitivities and techniques used to handle Bermudan optionality. To demonstrate the application of this work, we provide extensive numerical results on two commonly traded cross-currency exotic interest rate derivatives: cross-currency swaps and power reverse dual currency swaps. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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