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The diversity crisis in paleontology refers not to modern biota or the fossil record, but rather how our discipline lacks significant representation of individuals varying in race, ethnicity, and other aspects of identity. This Element is a call to action for broadening participation through improved classroom approaches as described in four sections. First, a brief review of the crisis and key concepts are presented. Next, culturally responsive pedagogy and related practices are introduced. Third, specific applications are offered for drawing cultural connections to studying the fossil record. Finally, recommendations including self-reflection are provided for fostering your own cultural competency. Our discipline offers much for understanding earth history and contributing new knowledge to a world impacted by humans. However, we must first more effectively welcome, support, and inspire all students to embrace meaning and value in paleontology; it is critical for securing the future of our field.
If by monotheism we mean the idea of a single transcendent God who creates the universe out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo), as in the Abrahamic religions, then that is not found in the history of Hinduism. But if we mean a supreme, transcendent deity who impels the universe, sustains it and ultimately destroys it before causing it to emerge once again, who is the ultimate source of all other gods who are her or his emanations, then this idea does develop within that history. It is a Hindu monotheism and its nature that is the topic of this Element.
This Element deals with leadership and governance of corporations from the point of view of the board. We expand our understanding of board leadership by focusing on the modern company as a legal person comprised of a capital fund and the relationships among directors, shareholders, management and stakeholders. We propose a model which integrates insights from the fields of leadership and corporate governance and establishes a theoretical link illustrated by empirical findings in three intersections: team leadership on the board, the chair's leadership of the board, and strategic leadership by the board. We maintain this integrative model provides a powerful means to further an understanding of the board as the nexus of leadership and governance. We close this Element by identifying the new research directions that our integrative model opens up. We also identify the implications for practice for those who either serve on boards or provide support to them.
In the first third of the twentieth century, South America became the most important market for many European theatrical companies. When Italy found itself in various theatrical crises, Walter Mocchi created a transoceanic theatrical empire, using his business acumen to craft viable solutions. While his efforts were most visible in the sphere of opera, he played an extremely significant role in the promotion and circulation of popular forms of musical theatre (such as operetta) and staged world premieres of works by Italian superstars in Argentina (such as Mascagni's Isabeau), thus offering an early example of what Stephen Greenblatt calls 'cultural mobility'.
Both violence and non-violence are important themes in the Bahá'í Faith, but their relationship is not simple. The Bahá'í sacred writings see violence in the world – not just against Bahá'ís, but physical and structural violence against everyone – as being a consequence of the immature state of human civilization. The Baha'i community itself has been nonviolent since its founding by Baha'u'llah in the mid nineteenth century and has developed various strategies for responding to persecution nonviolently. This Element explores how their scriptures provide a blueprint for building a new, more mature, culture and civilization on this planet where violence will be rare and nonviolence prevalent.
The 2016 US election highlighted the potential for foreign governments to employ social media for strategic advantages, but the particular mechanisms through which social media affect international politics are underdeveloped. This Element shows that the populace often seeks to navigate complex issues of foreign policy through social media, which can amplify information and tilt the balance of support on these issues. In this context, the open media environment of a democracy is particularly susceptible to foreign influence whereas the comparatively closed media environment of a non-democracy provides efficient ways for these governments to promote regime survival.
Images play a crucial role in shaping and reflecting political life. Digitization has vastly increased the presence of such images in daily life, creating valuable new research opportunities for social scientists. We show how recent innovations in computer vision methods can substantially lower the costs of using images as data. We introduce readers to the deep learning algorithms commonly used for object recognition, facial recognition, and visual sentiment analysis. We then provide guidance and specific instructions for scholars interested in using these methods in their own research.
This Element deals with the know-how and show-how to accomplish high velocity business operations. The basis of these operations is real-time data and low latency processing. Relevant applications are pervasive due to the emerging technologies of IoT, 5G, AI and data analytics. This Element explores theories and methods of configuring, formulating and implementing high velocity business operations with properly designed and developed platforms and processes. Current mobile transformation is enabling the unwiring of businesses, de-territorializing them, and creating more opportunities for these operations. High velocity business processes increase throughput and efficiency, offering first-mover advantage. They also provide location-independence due to use of mobile platforms and devices (smartphones, tablets and wearables). This Element present mobility as a critical attribute of high velocity business operations, taking advantage of world-wide resources and expertise with well-designed mobile platforms and their data.
In 2015, the Old Fadama slum of Accra, Ghana was a government 'no-go zone' due to the generally lawless environment. Participatory action researchers (PAR) began working with three stakeholders to resolve complex challenges facing the community and city. In three years, they created a PAR cross-sector collaboration intervention incorporating data from 300 research participants working on sanitation. In 2018–2019, the stakeholders addressed the next priorities: community violence, solid waste, and a health clinic. The PAR intervention was replicated, supporting kayayei (women head porters) in Old Fadama, the Madina slum of Accra and four rural communities in northern Ghana. The process expanded, involving 2,400 stakeholders and an additional 2,048 beneficiaries. Cross-sector collaboration worked where other, more traditional development interventions did not. This PAR intervention provides developing-country governments with a solution for complex challenges: a low-cost, locally-designed tool that dramatically improved participation and resulted in projects that impact the public good. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Scholastic theologians made the Virgin Mary increasingly perfect over the Middle Ages in Europe. Mary became stainless, offering an impossible but ideologically useful vision of womanhood. This work offers an implicit theory of the utility and feelings of women in a Christian salvationary economy. The Virgin was put to use as a shaming technology, one that silenced and effaced women's affective lives. The shame still stands to this day, although in secularised mutated forms. This Element deploys the intellectual history of medieval thought to map the moves made in codifying Mary's perfection. It then uses contemporary gender and affect theory to consider the implications of Mary's perfection within modernity, mapping the emotional regimes of the medieval past upon the present.
Women are still underrepresented as public-sector organizational leaders, despite comprising half of the United States public-sector workforce. To explore the factors driving gender imbalance, this Element employs a problem-driven approach to examine gender imbalance in local government management. We use multiple methods, inductive and deductive research, and different theoretical frames for exploring why so few women are city or county managers. Our interviews, resume analysis and secondary data analysis suggesting that women in local government management face a complex puzzle of gendered experiences, career paths and appointment circumstances that lend insights into gender imbalanced leadership in this domain.
This Element provides a detailed overview of the structural changes in the Asia-Pacific region from the early 2000s onwards. It reviews the most relevant literature on this important topic. The following two research areas are explored: first, by deploying visual network analysis (VNA), we analyse cross-border interbank claims and liabilities of the individual countries located in the Asia-Pacific region. Such an analysis evaluates interbank exposures to systematically important banks within the specific market. The important advantage of VNA is that it allows us to examine the 'hierarchical' cross-country interbank contagion risk that seems to have been neglected in similar studies. Secondly, we evaluate the contagion risk to the individual countries spreading from the financial centres in Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, New York and London. The analysis unveils links and statistical factors that could be used as a key tool for detecting the potential triggers of systemic risk.
Science and technological innovation wield unfathomable power in the shaping of social life and the environment. Yet, the democratic control and shaping of technology remains at best an unfinished project, not least due to dominant paradigms of governance implicitly that have historically delegated the good to market forces. This Element explores responsible innovation as an emergent discourse in governing science and society relations. Specifically, it explores the making of responsible innovation through three lenses: first, as a way of reconfiguring the concept of responsibility in science governance with far-reaching implications for scientific culture and practice; second, as a way of injecting agency through deliberative methods aimed at anticipating and deliberating upon the kinds of possible worlds that science and technology bring into being; and third, as a framework for governing innovation sensitive to the dynamics of specific technologies and to the particular socio-political context in which innovation develops.
What can a study of antiquity contribute to the interdisciplinary paradigm of the environmental humanities? And how does this recent paradigm influence the way we perceive human-'nature' interactions in pre-modernity? By asking these and a number of related questions, this Element aims to show why the ancient tradition still matters in the Anthropocene. Offering new perspectives to think about what directions the ecological turn could take in classical studies, it revisits old material, including ancient Greek religion and mythology, with central concepts of contemporary environmental theory. It also critically engages with forms of classical reception in current debates, arguing that ancient ecological knowledge is a powerful resource for creating alternative world views.
The aim of this Element is to provide a novel framework for gaining a critical grasp on the present situation concerning animals. It offers reflections on resisting the established order as well as suggestions on what forms alternative, pro-animal ways of life might take. The central argument of the book is that the search for an anthropological difference - that is, for a marker of human uniqueness determined by way of a sharp human/animal distinction - should be set aside. In place of this traditional way of differentiating human beings from animals, the author sketches an alternative way of thinking and living in relation to animals based on indistinction, a concept that points toward the unexpected and profound ways in which human beings share in animal life, death, and potentiality. The implications of this approach are then examined in view of practical and theoretical discussions in the environmental humanities and related fields.
Newborn imitation has recently become the focus of a major controversy in the human sciences. New studies have reexamined the evidence and found it wanting. Imitation has been regarded as a crucial capability of neonates ever since 1977, when two American psychologists first published experiments appearing to demonstrate that babies at birth are able to copy a variety of facial movements. The findings overturned decades of assumptions about the competence of newborns. But what if claims for newborn imitation are not true? Influential theories about the mechanisms underlying imitation, the role of mirror neurons, the nature of the self and of infant mental states, will all have to be modified or abandoned if it turns out that babies cannot imitate at birth. This Element offers a critical assessment of those theories and the stakes involved.
This Element provides an explanation for the power of weak states in international politics, focusing on the case of international climate negotiations at the United Nations. The author points to the pitfalls of assuming that weak countries elicit power from their coordinated salience for climate issues. Contrastingly, it is argued that weak states' influence at global climate negotiations depends on the moral authority provided by strong states. The author maintains that weak states' authority is contingent on international vulnerability, which intersects broader domestic discussions of global justice, and pushes the leaders of strong countries to concede power to weak countries. New empirical evidence is shown in support of the theory.
There has been a surge in scholarship on policy design over the last ten years, as scholars seek to understand and develop existing concepts, theories, and methods engaged in the study of policy design in the context of modern governance. This Element adds to the current discourse on the study of policy design by (i) presenting behavioral assumptions and structural features of policy design; (ii) presenting a multi-level analytical framework for organizing policy design research; (iii) highlighting the role of policy compatibility and policy adaptability in influencing policy efficacy; and (iv) presenting future research recommendations relating to these topics.
How can the world's religions, which propagate peace and love, promote violence and the killing of innocent civilians through terrorist acts? This Element aims to provide insights into this puzzle by beginning with a brief overview of debates on terrorism, a discussion on religion and the various resources it provides groups engaging in terrorist acts, four arguments for what causes religious terrorism, brief examples of religious terrorism across faith traditions, and a synopsis of deradicalization programs. This discussion shows that, when combined with certain political and social circumstances, religions provide powerful resources for justifying and motivating terrorist acts against civilians.
Since Meese and Rogoff (1983) results showed that no model could outperform a random walk in predicting exchange rates. Many papers have tried to find a forecasting methodology that could beat the random walk, at least for certain forecasting periods. This Element compares the Purchasing Power Parity, the Uncovered Interest Rate, the Sticky Price, the Bayesian Model Averaging, and the Bayesian Vector Autoregression models to the random walk benchmark in forecasting exchange rates between most South American currencies and the US Dollar, and between the Paraguayan Guarani and the Brazilian Real and the Argentinian Peso. Forecasts are evaluated under the criteria of Root Mean Square Error, Direction of Change, and the Diebold-Mariano statistic. The results indicate that the two Bayesian models have greater forecasting power and that there is little evidence in favor of using the other three fundamentals models, except Purchasing Power Parity at longer forecasting horizons.