Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? By Abdallah Laroui The Muslim Mind . By Charis Waddy The Ethics of al-Ghazali: A Composite Ethics in Islam . By Muhammad Abul Quassem Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law . By Uriel Heyd. Edited by V. L. Ménage The Muslim Filipinos. Their History, Society and Contemporary Problems . Edited by Peter G. Gowing and Robert D. McAmis. Tunisie du Sud: Ksars et Villages de Crětes . By André Louis. Preface by H. E. Habib Bourguiba The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia: 1919–1929 . By Gregory J. Massell Zur Soziologie der Dekolonisation in Afrika (On the Sociology of Decolonization in Africa) . Edited by Gerhard Grohs and Bassam Tibi Militär und Sozialismus in der Dritten Welt (Military and Socialism in the Third World) . By Bassam Tibi     

Extraction of Hierarchical Surface Networks from Bilinear Surface Patches

Surface networks capture the topological relations between passes of a continuous surface, the paths of steepest descent and ascent starting at the passes, and the pits and peaks where the steepest paths end. Surface networks represent the topology of surfaces in a compressed form and allow fast investigation of the surfaces' convex and concave shapes. They are applied, for instance, for enhancing algorithms for surface analysis, for surface model simplification, and for surfaces visualization. Furthermore, they are themselves subjects of analysis as they are closely coupled to the intrinsic geometrical concepts and rules of continuous surfaces.
This article extends the topology of surface networks in four ways: (i) objects at the edge of the surface model are introduced; (ii) intersections between valley and ridge lines are found to be possible, and such intersections are incorporated into the topology; (iii) horizontal areas may represent passes, pits, or peaks, and therefore must be detected and explicitly incorporated; and (iv) valley and ridge line hierarchies are recognized as inherent components of the surface network. They are extracted and explicitly represented.
To ensure consistency and completeness of the surface network, a zero-order continuous surface is specified from the raster data prior to the extraction. This article presents a method to represent and derive valley and ridge line hierarchies. The results are illustrated with two examples. The extracted networks are found to be consistent and complete. However, the extraction method tends to produce spurious pits, peaks, and passes, which form a drawback if the surface data are affected by noise.     

Circulation of Coronavirus Images: Helping Social Distancing?

As soon as the SARS-Cov2 disease was recognized by experts to potentially cause a serious pandemic, a three dimensional diagrammatic image of the virus, colored in strong red, conquered public media globally. This study confronts this iconic virus image with a historic image analysis of 33,000 biomedical articles on coronaviruses published between 1968–2020 and interviews with some of their authors. Only a small fraction of scientific virus publications entail images of the complete virus. Red as an alarm color is not used at all by scientists who don't aim for a non-scientific public. Circulation in this case concerns the movement of iconic images from a scientific context into a general public. On the basis of hps-studies on scientific diagrams and especially on color use in scientific diagrams to convey specific messages in public, the paper discusses the role of the claim of public corona-virus diagram as “scientific.” It points at relevant differences between most frequent scientific corona-virus images and the diagrammatic image used in public. Both author- and readerships (in science and public) follow contrasting aims and values. Thus, the images meet non-expert readers for whom the images entail very different – and potentially unintended – meanings then to virus experts.     

Liberty,bondage and liberation in the Late Bronze Age*

ABSTRACT

Free versus unfree was a fundamental axis of differentiation in ancient Near Eastern societies. Liberty was conceptualized as the power to govern oneself, free from another's domination, thus free to participate in constituting political authority. More concretely, the subject of the state was by definition free, this being the condition of obliging him for duty. Thus the relation between people and polity was predicated on liberty, not servitude as commonly supposed of an area still shackled to the Western ideology of Oriental despotism. I argue that liberty was an operative principle in the organization of ancient Near Eastern polities, basing the case on sources from the Late Bronze Age. The first section sets forth general propositions, and the second puts them in ancient Near Eastern terms. The third and fourth sections examine documents from Ugarit and Emar, two polities under Hittite suzerainty, that illustrate how these principles operated in the lives of individuals. The fifth section examines how they were articulated at the scale of communities, through the lens of the poet(s) who composed the Hurro-Hittite ‘Song of Liberation'. The conclusion draws together the ideas of liberty, bondage and liberation these sources disclose, ideas that remained productive in later ages.     

Financialization and Global Commodity Chains: Distributional Implications for Cotton in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Restructuring of global and local markets has led to an increased influence of commodity derivatives markets on commodity price setting. This has critical implications for price risks experienced by actors along commodity chains. Commodity derivatives markets have undergone significant changes that have been referred to as the ‘financialization of commodities’, which we define as an increase in trading activity by financial investors and the reorientation of business strategies by commodity trading houses towards risk management and financial activities. This article assesses how these global financialization processes affect commodity producers in low‐income countries via the operational dynamics of global commodity chains and national market structures. It investigates how prices are set and transmitted and how risks are distributed and managed in the cotton sectors in Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Tanzania. It concludes that uneven exposure to price instability and access to price risk management have important distributional implications. Whilst international traders have the capacity to deal with price risks through hedging, in addition to expanding their profit possibilities through financial activities on derivatives markets, local actors in producing countries face the challenge of increased short‐termism — albeit to different extents depending on national market structures — with limited access to risk management.     

Digging deeper into the limits of ancient DNA research on syphilis

The search for the origins of syphilis has a long history in the medical and anthropological literatures. If we know more about the emergence of the pathogen that causes the disease in humans we will understand its evolution through time and space as well as shed light on its current state in living populations. Ancient DNA techniques used to isolate Treponema pallidum subsp. pallidum DNA from archaeological human specimens provide direct evidence of its existence in the past. However to date, only Kolman et al. (1999) have been successful in this endeavour, while other attempts have failed (e.g., Barnes and Thomas, 2006; Bouwman and Brown, 2005). Why has there been little success? This paper serves to compliment and add relevant information to Bouwman and Brown's and Barnes and Thomas' discussion concerning our inability to apply ancient DNA techniques to study venereal syphilis in past human populations.Our approach utilized 15 different human specimens from different geographies and different temporal periods: eight samples come from medically diagnosed individuals archived during the American Civil War period; six originate from the United Kingdom and predate 1492 with four of these samples having been previously analyzed by Bouwman and Brown and one sample comes from historic Canada. Human mitochondrial and amelogenin DNA, as well as several genes from the Treponema organism were analyzed revealing the relatively good preservation of human multi-copy and single copy DNA but not treponemal DNA. This study also incorporates a unique molecular experiment using rabbits infected with venereal syphilis to help illustrate that treponemal DNA disseminates to bone early during the first stages of infection but is not present in later stages of the disease using the techniques presented in this study.     

A nation's parks: failure and success in Fascist nature conservation

Nature conservation is a complex venture, with a great impact, among other things, on local and national power relationships. Nature conservation also depends on a wide set of variables to determine any one planned initiative's long-term success or failure. This article explores what made the difference between success and failure in the history of nature conservation under Mussolini's regime. Many parks were planned in those years in Italy, but only a handful were effectively instituted. This essay will address the following questions: What were the reasons behind the planning and creation of these national parks? What was the role of Fascist ideology in determining the long-term success of a park proposal? Was there anything specifically Fascist in Italian nature conservation in the 1920s and 1930s? Which other variables impacted on the involved decision-making processes?