"Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta uses the story of mud to answer a deceptively simple question: How can a place uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise be one of the nation’s most promiscuous producers and consumers of fossil fuels?"
Biblical Gilgal: A Common Place Name or a Cult Site near Jericho?
“Gilgal was a national cult centre of the Kingdom of Israel, and in several references its name appears alongside that of Bethel (1 Sam 7:16; 2 Kgs 2:1–2; Hos 4:15; 12:12; Amos 4:4; 5:4–5). Bethel, located in the highlands, was the seat of a national temple (see Amos 7:13) and the place where the golden calf, the animal sacred to the Storm God, represented the God of Israel in his temple.”
“He argued that all four sublunar elements, namely, earth, water, air, and fire, can be analysed into geometrical units which take two shapes: cubical when at rest, and pyramidal when in motion. This allowed him, in turn, to solve the difficulty of the participation of the cubical portions of earth in elemental transmutations, which was due to the triangular faces of the other elements.”
#Journals | Journal of the European Optical Society-Rapid Publications
"Germanium Fabry-Perot nanoresonators investigated by cathodoluminescence spectroscopy"
✍️ Paolo Biagioni et al. #PolitecnicoDiMilano @imperialcollege #UniWürzburg
“Hermeneutical disarmament is the process by which a person is rendered less able to understand or communicate experiences, ideas, and other phenomena as a result of semantic change to the linguistic resources that could previously have been deployed for these purposes.”
Ancient genomes revealed the complex human interactions of the ancient western Tibetans
“Outside the Tibetan Plateau, the western Tibetan Plateau populations interacted with both South and Central Asian populations at least 2,000 years ago, and the South Asian-related genetic influence, despite being very limited, was from the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) migrants in Central Asia instead of the IVC populations from the Indus Valley.”
F. A. Hayek, Libertarianism, and the Denationalization of Money
“Hayek found support within the American libertarian movement. Libertarians realized that Hayek’s radical proposal would limit state control over the monetary system and allow for the free exchange of gold.”
McIntosh, W. (2024) ‘F. A. Hayek, Libertarianism, and the Denationalization of Money’, Modern American History, pp. 1–20. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/mah.2024.19.
Conditional Enfranchisement: How Partisanship Determines Support for Noncitizen Voting Rights
“Our findings suggest that U.S. voters are pragmatic about extending the local franchise to noncitizens. Although U.S. voters are, on average, indifferent toward local noncitizen suffrage, they oppose enfranchisement when noncitizens would vote for the opposing party.”
ALARIAN, H. and ZONSZEIN, S. (2024) ‘Conditional Enfranchisement: How Partisanship Determines Support for Noncitizen Voting Rights’, American Political Science Review, pp. 1–8. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424000522.
Good news on open access to my works on bilingualism, the research area related to my teaching, child-raising, and using Japanese for over 40 years. I was interviewed by The Japan Times on #bilingual#education for a forthcoming paywalled article. It was a long interview, and usually a newspaper article uses only short passages from one individual. However, the #Japan Association for #Language#Teaching Bilingualism Special Interest Group (#JALT#Bilingualism SIG) would like to publish the full interview in its newsletter Bilingual Japan. Everyone should be able to read that as I back it up in research repositories. The tentative title is "English Education and Bilingual Education in Japan."
My publications on bilingualism have been backed up mostly at Academia Edu, which is not so easy to access anymore [any comment?], so I've added links to the original sources of articles, which are open access, at https://japanned.hcommons.org/bilingualism
Origen of Alexandria and the History of Racism as a Theological Problem
“Earlier scholarly accounts that portray Origen as a champion of human equality and as engaged in anti-racist efforts therefore cannot stand up to scrutiny. Origen disparages certain ethnic groups and develops arguments that connect ethnic identity and geographical location with various degrees of sinfulness. His work offers clear evidence that theories of ethnic inferiority have a long history within the Christian matrix that stretches considerably beyond the modern and medieval periods.”
Matthijs den Dulk, Origen of Alexandria and the History of Racism as a Theological Problem, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 71, Issue 1, April 2020, Pages 164–195, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flaa025
#Image attribution: Luyken, Jan (1649-1712), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OrigenStudentsLuyken.jpg
“The fakes created during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tell us another story, one of the rediscovery of the ancient Near East within the Orientalism movement. This fascination about the Orient and the past led certain individuals to create some fantastic stories and theories, such as those published by the writer Zecharia Stichin (1920–2010) who took the mythological battles of gods related in the authentic Babylonian Epic of Creation to be real astronomic phenomena.”
Michel, C. 2020. Cuneiform Fakes: A Long History from Antiquity to the Present Day. In: Michel, C. and Friedrich, M. ed. Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 25-60. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110714333-002
“The fakes created during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tell us another story, one of the rediscovery of the ancient Near East within the Orientalism movement. This fascination about the Orient and the past led certain individuals to create some fantastic stories and theories, such as those published by the writer Zecharia Stichin (1920–2010) who took the mythological battles of gods related in the authentic Babylonian Epic of Creation to be real astronomic phenomena.”
Michel, C. 2020. Cuneiform Fakes: A Long History from Antiquity to the Present Day. In: Michel, C. and Friedrich, M. ed. Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 25-60. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110714333-002
“The extent to which the worship of Baal and Asherah affected Israel’s understanding of Yahweh is seen in the inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud. Jezebel was not fully responsible for the ongoing worship of Canaanite deities in Israel and Judah but her reign gave legitimacy to the long held tendency.”
Dolan, M. (2024) “Jezebel: A Hebrew Disaster”, Buried History: The Journal of the Australian Institute of Archaeology, 40, pp. 39–48. https://doi.org/10.62614/7d25h288
“Because a growing share of Americans hold highly unfavourable views of big corporations, we argue that the belief that large firms win from trade will provoke hostility towards trade and globalization. To test this theory, we show experimentally that informing people that large corporations benefit from trade makes them markedly more hostile towards trade compared to a treatment emphasizing that firms in exporting industries benefit.”
Menon, A. and Osgood, I. (2024) ‘The Wrong Winners: Anti-Corporate Animus and Attitudes Towards Trade’, British Journal of Political Science, pp. 1–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123424000152.
"Because a growing share of Americans hold highly unfavourable views of big corporations, we argue that the belief that large firms win from trade will provoke hostility towards trade and globalization. To test this theory, we show experimentally that informing people that large corporations benefit from trade makes them markedly more hostile towards trade compared to a treatment emphasizing that firms in exporting industries benefit."
Menon, A. and Osgood, I. (2024) ‘The Wrong Winners: Anti-Corporate Animus and Attitudes Towards Trade’, British Journal of Political Science, pp. 1–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123424000152.
"Focusing on classical philologists and biblical scholars in nineteenth-century Germany, it examines how Hyperkritik developed from a technical philological term into a pejorative label that was widely invoked to discredit the latest trends in classical philology and, especially, biblical scholarship."
"After a thorough examination, we may conclude that the item’s amateurish preparation and local origin are suggestive of a scribal exercise. The use of an available mould that was not suitable for a tablet, the child’s fingerprint on the reverse and the corrected mistakes in the script all point to an inexperienced scribe."
“After a thorough examination, we may conclude that the item’s amateurish preparation and local origin are suggestive of a scribal exercise. The use of an available mould that was not suitable for a tablet, the child’s fingerprint on the reverse and the corrected mistakes in the script all point to an inexperienced scribe.”
“Four factors are found to be significant predictors of the position of primary stress: endings, word complexity, the segmental structure of the final syllable, and syllable count. Moreover, this study confirms previous observations on the tendency for American English to have more final stress in French loanwords than British English.”
Dabouis, Q. and Fournier, P. (2024) ‘Stress in French loanwords in British and American English’, Journal of Linguistics, pp. 1–26. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226724000136.
New study (quoting Google's translation): "The main factors that led [#Japanese] researchers to implement #OpenAccess for the first time were external factors such as the #journal they submitted to and the #policies of their…institutions…[But] after the researcher realized her OA through external factors, there was a tendency for internal factors to gradually develop such that he wanted to contribute to the OA." https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jims/22/1/22_68/_article/-char/ja
"A Bayesian analysis showed that participants had high expectations and performed descriptively better irrespective of the AI description when a sham-AI was present. Using cognitive modeling, we could trace this advantage back to participants gathering more information."
Agnes Mercedes Kloft, Robin Welsch, Thomas Kosch, and Steeven Villa. 2024. "AI enhances our performance, I have no doubt this one will do the same": The Placebo effect is robust to negative descriptions of AI. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 299, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642633