Erasmus’ ethnological hierarchy of peoples and races

No comprehensive research of Erasmus’ ethnological mind has been published, so far. Erasmus’ attitudes toward Turks and Jews were discussed analytically but not synthetically or comparatively. An attempt to widen the ethnological scope and to define and classify Erasmus’ attitudes toward different non-Christian groups is presented here. Christian Europeans (populus Christianus) were at the top of Erasmus’ echelon. Second to them were ‘half-Christians’, i.e. Turks, or Muslims in general. Below them were Jews, and lower in the hierarchy were black Africans (Aethiopes). Yet, no one was unworthy of conversion to Christianity, even barbarians of the third kind – according to Bartolomé Las Casas’ sort – the most inferior barbarians, slaves by nature, as defined by Aristotle. According to Las Casas, these barbarians were too low to ask for God and were not candidates for conversion to Christianity. Erasmus’ believed that Barbarians of any kind deserved Christianity without being brutally forced to accept it. Yet, in practice, converts from Judaism to Christianity were rated, even by Erasmus, as lower than Christians. This, in addition to the principle that Christian peace excludes war against the Turks, is the very essence of Erasmus’ pax et concordia.     

The earliest fractured tetrapod bone

A tetrapod radius from the Early Carboniferous Ducabrook Formation of the Drummond Basin, Queensland, is described. Early tetrapod radii are scarce in the fossil record but comparison with those available suggests that the new specimen is morphologically primitive. An unusual swelling of the proximal extensor surface is shown, by X-ray, to be a comminuted fracture, the earliest bone fracture recorded among tetrapods.     

New High-Tech Industries and Windows of Locational Opportunity: The Role OfLabour Markets and Knowledge Institutions During the Industrial Era

This paper presents a theoretical concept (the so-called“Open Windows of Locational Opportunity” concept, or OWLO concept) which provides an explanation for why it is rather uncertain and unpredictable where new high-technology industries will emerge in space. This is due to three tightly linked features of new high-tech industries. Firstly, new high-tech industries reflect a high rate of discontinuity because they place new demandson their local production environment. Secondly, due to this mismatch, new high-tech industries depend on their creative ability to generate or attract their own favourable production environment. This creative capacity compensates for the lack of specific local stimuli, as associated with their discontinuous nature. Thirdly, the OWLO concept claims that chance events may have a considerable impact on the place where new industries emerge. This is because it remains unpredictable at which place potentially favourable resources of a generic nature set in motion a creative process which brings increasing returns (that is, “localization economies”) into the local production environment. As a consequence, many regions are considered to be in a more or less equal position to develop new high-tech industries during their initialstage of growth, despite their different techno-industrial histories. We have further illustrated this OWLO concept by linking it to the problem of whether regional labour markets and knowledge institutions may facilitate the ability of regions to generate new high-tech industries, despite the fact that these require new knowledge and skills. We made an attempt to specify in broad terms the extent to which local supplies of labour and institutionalized knowledge may have influenced the place where so-called new clusters of innovative industries emerged in Great Britain and Belgium during the industrial epoch. We presented some evi-dence that the three key notions of the OWLO concept described above have indeed been features of the spatial emergence of many new clusters in both countries during their initial stage of development.     

Scale,Factor Analyses,and Neighborhood Effects

Studies of potential neighborhood effects have been constrained in most situations by the absence of small‐area data generated to characterize the local contexts within which individuals operate. Using small‐area data from the U.K. Census, this paper Illustrates the creation of bespoke neighborhoods—local areas defined separately for each individual in a sample survey—at a variety of scales, and their characterization using factor analysis techniques. Theories of neighborhood effects are uncertain as to the spatial scale at which the relevant processes operate, hence the value of exploring patterns consistent with those processes at a range of spatial scales. One problem with such comparative study is the incommensurability of regression coefficients derived from analyses using factor scores as the independent variables. The work reported here adapts a procedure introduced for reconstituting partial regression coefficients to circumvent that problem, and illustrates that patterns of voting at a recent British general election showed neighborhood‐effect‐like patterns at two separate scales simultaneously—with individual voter characteristics held constant.     

Labour electoral landslides and the changing efficiency of voting distributions

The translation of votes into seats under first–past–the–post electoral systems with single–member constituencies invariably results in disproportional allocations of seats relative to votes among the main two parties. It also tends to produce biased outcomes, with one party getting a more disproportionate share of the seats with a given share of the votes than does its opponent. In Great Britain, these biases favoured the Conservative party until the 1980s, but now strongly favour Labour. Production of those biases results from a variety of influences involving the interaction of the geography of party support with that of constituency boundaries. Increasingly, that interaction has favoured Labour: without any explicit manipulation of the constituency map to its own ends, it now benefits substantially from the equivalent of the malapportionment and gerrymandering cartographic abuses typical of the United States, because of its ability to manipulate its vote distribution within the constituency system.