Incentives for the Iranian Chemical Boom: A Strategic Motivation or Applied Needs?

Iran's scientific impact has suffered hard from decades of imposed and self‐elected isolation from Western influences and international collaboration. Lately, however, the world has witnessed a remarkable increase in scientific publications from Iranian scientists in fields like nanotechnology; material science; and, perhaps most pronounced, chemistry. In this article, the factors behind this “publication boom” are discussed and examined together with an analysis of the coherence between the country's long‐term research strategies and short‐term needs in relation to present organic chemical research conducted at various Iranian universities and institutes. Organic chemistry is a keystone in important Iranian industrial sectors like the petroleum and agricultural industries, and also in the growing field of life science and pharmacology. The development of the petroleum industry and further refinement of raw oil into value‐added fine chemicals holds a key position in the reinforcement of the Iranian economy and labor market, thus motivating a governmental investment in chemical science and research. Taking an approach to find a reasonable balance with the impact from Western and Far Eastern scientific communities, Iran's own scientific roots and Islamic ideology could well be the success factor in becoming a worthy player on the international scientific arena.     

The Natsyas of the Grodno region of Belarus: A Field Study

Abstract. This research was conducted in 1993–4 in several peripheral kolkhoz villages in the north-west Belarus Grodno province, a religious (Catholic/Orthodox) and linguistic (Belarussian/RussiadPolish/Lithuanian)borderland. The members of the folk communities of this region conceive and categorise social reality differently than it is done by the members of a nationalised and urbanised society, according to religious, and not nation-state, criteria. People are divided by these criteria into natsyas, i.e. religious groups. There are two main natsyas: the Catholics (also called Poles) and the Orthodox (called Rus' or Belarussians). The distinctive criterion for several natsyus is the language of a prayer: the Catholics pray in Polish and/or Lithuanian, the Orthodox in Old Church Slavonic and Russian. The terms Catholic natsya and Polish natsya (and similarly Orthodox natsya or Rus' natsya) are synonymous. The language of everyday speech does not differentiate the natsyas; all the villagers speak Belarussian dialect or so called ‘plain language’. The natsya, a concept specific of traditional folk societies, should not be confused with a ‘nation’, a political term of the modem world. None the less, the kolkhoz peasants of the region under study are confronted with a concept of ‘nation’. It results in a turmoil in their worldview and in confusion about their identity; what we see in the Belarussian villages is a process of change. The borderland where the material was collected seems an excellent field for the study of the process of the emergence of nations.     

The emergence of status inequality in intermediate scale societies: A demographic and socio-economic history of the Keatley Creek site,British Columbia

Explaining the emergence of status inequality in human societies is an important priority for many anthropological archaeologists, particularly those whose research includes intermediate scale societies (complex hunter–gatherers and early agriculturalists). Yet, fine grained records of emergent inequality are still exceedingly rare. This paper outlines a fine-grained record of cultural change from the Keatley Creek site, a complex hunter–gatherer village in British Columbia, in which it is possible to recognize the emergence of inequality and its demographic and economic correlates. Results of the study suggest that status inequality emerged abruptly after an extended period of socio-economic stability in the village under conditions of adversely altered resource conditions, demographic packing, and subsistence resource diversification and extensification.     

The Place of Anzac in Australian Historical Consciousness

There is an ever-greater popular attachment to the commemoration of Anzac Day in Australia, with growing commercial, popular and institutional support around the country. This resurgence has also generated significant disagreement among historians, shaping the historiography of Anzac in recent years and raising important questions about Australia’s current obsession with Anzac: is it a reflection of increasing popular historical engagement, or an ideologically driven ‘mobilisation’ of the past? While various scholars have sought to unpack and understand this potent phenomenon of national sentiment, this article, based on a series of oral interviews with ordinary Australians in selected communities, reveals an uncertainty and complexity in many vernacular responses to Anzac that need to be included if that commemorative sentiment is to be properly understood.     

Working with images and texts: Elio Vittorini’s Il Politecnico

Il Politecnico (1945–47) is the most relevant Italian cultural journal in the immediate aftermath of WWII. It is also the most anomalous; the systematic integration in its graphic layout of textual and visual elements made it more similar to the illustrated magazines of the time than to other cultural journals. The choice to present highbrow contents in a graphic layout associated with popular mass media served to complicate the already tricky relationship between the editor – the writer Elio Vittorini – and the intellectuals working in the cultural agencies planning the journal: the Italian Communist Party and the publishing house Einaudi. A reconstruction of the intellectual network surrounding Il Politecnico and of how it began shrinking during the months of its lifespan shows how this conflict developed and finally led to its closure.     

EVALUATING THE WELFARE EFFECTS OF SCHOOL QUALITY IMPROVEMENTS: A RESIDENTIAL SORTING APPROACH

Las Vegas experienced improvements in math and reading performance between 2006 and 2011. This study evaluates the benefits of these nonmarginal improvements to Las Vegas area homeowners, using a residential sorting model. We estimate households’ preferences for multiple characteristics including the proportion of proficient students in their assigned elementary school. The estimation accounts for the endogeneity of school quality using school boundary fixed effects. The welfare estimates suggest that the school quality improvements provided substantial benefits to the area's households. We find that benefit measures derived from a hedonic price model are substantially larger than our sorting model benefit measures.     

James Mill's treatment of religion and the History of British India

James Mill's History of British India’ (1817) played a major role in re-shaping the English policy and attitudes in India throughout the nineteenth century. This article questions the widely held view that the ‘HBI’ heralded the utilitarian justification of colonisation found for instance in John Stuart Mill's writings. It suggests that James Mill's role as a proponent of ‘utilitarian imperialism’ has been overstated, and argues that much of Mill's criticism of Indian society arose from the continuing influence of his religious education as well as from his links with a network of Presbyterian and Evangelical thinkers. It is only after his death that the colonialist views put forward in the History of British India were re-interpreted in light of his later attachment to utilitarianism.     

Irrigated taro (Colocasia esculenta) farming in North Kohala,Hawai‘i: sedimentology and soil nutrient analyses

How did traditional farming transform the natural environment in the Hawaiian Islands? This question is one that has largely been addressed for rainfed farming of crops like sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), but evidence is lacking for irrigated farming of the critical staple crop taro (Colocasia esculenta). We describe the results of soil nutrient and sedimentological analyses of deeply-stratified pondfield deposits representing a 600-year-long record of irrigated taro farming in the North Kohala District, Hawai‘i Island. Soil is categorized by particle size to determine modes of transport and deposition, and concurrent soil nutrient analyses were conducted to infer shifts in the source of sediments and changes associated with taro harvesting. The advent of farming is clearly detectable in sedimentology, the presence of charcoal found within sediments, and soil chemistry. However, diminished nutrient concentrations can be attributed largely to deposition of a mixture of upstream sediments. Overall, there is no clear evidence for nutrient draw-down by taro harvesting, but we cannot yet rule it out as a factor. This study demonstrates the inherent difficulty of correlating changes in soil nutrients evident in irrigated pondfields with the long term history of soil nutrient cycling.     

The role of canids in ritual and domestic contexts: new ancient DNA insights from complex hunter–gatherer sites in prehistoric Central California

This study explores the interrelationship between the genus Canis and hunter–gatherers through a case study of prehistoric Native Americans in the San Francisco Bay-Sacramento Delta area. A distinctive aspect of the region's prehistoric record is the interment of canids, variously classified as coyotes, dogs, and wolves. Since these species are difficult to distinguish based solely on morphology, ancient DNA analysis was employed to distinguish species. The DNA study results, the first on canids from archaeological sites in California, are entirely represented by domesticated dogs (including both interments and disarticulated samples from midden deposits). These results, buttressed by stable isotope analyses, provide new insight into the complex interrelationship between humans and canids in both ritual and prosaic contexts, and reveal a more prominent role for dogs than previously envisioned.