THE ORIGIN,DESTRUCTION AND RESTORATION OF COLOUR IN EGYPTIAN TRAVERTINE*

Travertine was one of ancient Egypt's most popular ornamental stones. Upon prolonged exposure to sunlight, the rock's translucent brownish calcite is bleached to nearly white. Ultraviolet and gamma irradiation experiments were undertaken to investigate the source of the brownish colour and the process by which it fades. It was found that the coloration results from the activation of colour centres by natural radioactivity within the rock, and that these colour centres are deactivated by the ultraviolet component of sunlight. The results also demonstrate that the original brownish colour of sun‐bleached, travertine objects can be restored by artificial gamma irradiation.     

1. THE DEFINING CHARACTER OF CHINESE HISTORICAL THINKING1

Imbued with profound historical consciousness, the Chinese people are Homo historiens in every sense of the term. To be human in China, to a very large extent, is to be historical, which means to live up to the paradigmatic past. Therefore, historical thinking in traditional China is moral thinking. The Chinese historico‐moral thinking centers around the notion of Dao, a notion that connotes both Heavenly principle and human norm. In view of its practical orientation, Chinese historical thinking is, on the one hand, concrete thinking and, on the other, analogical thinking. Thinking concretely and analogically, the Chinese people are able to communicate with the past and to extrapolate meanings from history. In this way, historical experience in China becomes a library in which modern readers may engage in creative dialogues with the past.     

Les mots de l’histoire (1925–1945)

Sans résumé Ses recherches portent sur l’histoire des idées du XVIII ^e au XX ^e siècle, sur la méthodologie philosophique et l’épistémologie. Elle a récemment publié, sous sa direction, Comparatismi e filosofia, Naples, Liguori, 2006. à propos du recueil Les Mots de l’histoire. Le vocabulaire historique du Centre international de synthèse, édition établie, présentée et annotée par Margherita Platania, trad. de l’italien rév. par Catherine Rutili, Naples, Bibliopolis, 2000, 497 p. (Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, Serie Testi, XIV). Ce texte est issu d’une conférence prononcée le 3 mai 2002 au Centre international de synthèse, à Paris (H?tel de Nevers, salon de Madame de Lambert).     

The Public Policy Process among Southeastern States: Elaborating Theories of Regional Adoption and Hold‐Out Behavior

Having been adopted by legislatures in over a dozen states, postsecondary merit aid programs are largely concentrated in the southeastern United States. The observed clustering pattern seems to support previous evidence that policies spread between proximate states, a phenomenon referred to by political scientists as policy diffusion. Often, however, policy diffusion is not complete, and one or more states in a region fail to adopt. By interviewing policymakers throughout the southeastern United States—including actors in the three states in the region without merit aid—the study addresses the following question: Why do diffusion pressures lead to adoption in some states but not in others? Studying state “hold‐outs” promises not only to uncover the reasons for failed legislation in specific state contexts but also to better our understanding of the limits of diffusion theory.