Understanding terrestrial carbon metabolism is critical because terrestrial ecosystems play a major role in the global carbon cycle. Furthermore, humans have severely disrupted the carbon cycle in ways that will alter the climate system and directly affect terrestrial metabolism. Changes in terrestrial metabolism may well be as important an indicator of global change as the changing temperature signal. Improving our understanding of the carbon cycle at various spatial and temporal scales will require the integration of multiple, complementary and independent methods (...) that are used by different research communities. Tools such as air sampling networks, inverse numerical methods, and satellite data allow us to study the strength and location of the global- and continental-scale carbon sources and sinks. Bottom-up studies provide estimates of carbon fluxes at finer spatial scales and examine the mechanisms that control fluxes at the ecosystem, landscape, and regional scales. Bottom-up approaches include comparative and process studies that provide the necessary mechanistic information to develop and validate terrestrial biospheric models. An iteration and reiteration of top-down and bottom-up approaches will be necessary to help constrain measurements at various scales. We propose a major international effort to coordinate and lead research programs of global scope of the carbon cycle. (shrink)

Abstractc‐Rel is a proto‐oncogene first identified as the cellular counterpart of the v‐Rel oncogene derived from the avian reticuloendotheliosis retrovirus (REV‐T). It was subsequently discovered that c‐Rel belongs to the NF‐κB/Rel transcription factor family whose members share a common DNA recognition motif and similar signaling pathways. Despite the similarities, however, each NF‐κB/Rel member possesses unique properties with regard to tissue expression pattern, response to receptor signals and target gene specificity. These differences are fairly evident from the non‐redundant phenotypes exhibited by (...) individual NF‐κB/Rel knockout mice. Hence the work described in this review will compare and contrast the various physiological functions of c‐Rel to those of other NF‐κB members, particularly with respect to the regulation of proliferation, survival and effector functions in multiple hematopoietic and immunological cell types. The study of c‐Rel knockout mice in several disease models will also be discussed as they reveal an important role for c‐Rel in response to allergens, auto‐antigens, allo‐antigens and pathogenic infection. BioEssays 25:767–780, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Slaves and the Generals of ArginusaePeter HuntIn the second half of 406 B.C. the Athenians made two shocking decisions. They freed the slaves who had fought in the battle of Arginusae and gave them citizenship, and they condemned to death their victorious generals. I suggest that these two events were related. Specifically, I would like to argue, first, that the competition for rowers to man the huge navies (...) of this period had extended even to slaves. The promise of freedom was intended to motivate the slaves: the grant of Athenian citizenship was an attempt to keep them rowing for Athens rather than deserting and ending up in the enemy's navy. Second, I would like to consider the trial of the generals in the context of this costly, divisive, and controversial policy. A priori considerations, historical parallels, and a few admittedly tenuous pieces of direct evidence suggest that their policy of rewarding the slaves contributed to the generals' unpopularity that made them so vulnerable to prosecution.Slaves to CitizensPassages in Aristophanes' Frogs and a scholiast's quotation of Hellanicus tell us that the slaves who fought in the battle of Arginusae were given freedom and citizenship. Most historians believe that the Athenians freed these slaves,1 but, given Athenian exclusiveness-manifest in Pericles' citizenship law-some doubt that they would have allowed a large group [End Page 359] of slaves to become citizens.2 The evidence, however, indicates that this was exactly what happened.Frogs won first prize at the Lenaean festival of 405-406, about six months after the Athenian naval victory at Arginusae. Early in the play, Dionysus and his slave Xanthias are traveling to Hades. When Dionysus mocks Xanthias for complaining about the load he is carrying, Xanthias exclaims:Dash it all, why wasn't I in that naval battle? Then I could really and truly tell you to go to blazes!(Ar. Ran. 33)3Fighting in the naval battle would have freed Xanthias from carrying Dionysus' baggage and allowed him to tell his master off. A bit later, Charon refuses to ferry Xanthias to Hades:I don't take slaves, unless they fought in the life-or-death naval battle.(190-91)4Again, slaves who have fought in a naval battle are treated differently from other slaves. From these passages alone, one might guess that the slaves who fought in some naval battle-Arginusae being the most recent and probable one-were given their freedom: they did not have to serve their masters and could ride with Charon rather than walking around the lake to get to Hades.Ian Worthington argues against this, the traditional reading of these lines. Xanthias' regret at not serving in the naval battle (33) is not that he would be then be free, but rather that then he would be dead and not forced to serve Dionysus.5 Aristophanes, however, was addressing an [End Page 360] audience many of whom had either fought at Arginusae or had relatives who had. We may associate Arginusae primarily with the deaths of the unrescued crews, but in 405 Arginusae was considered a successful relief mission and a great victory. Aristophanes was addressing the living victors, for whom "to fight at the naval battle" could not serve as shorthand for "to die." Worthington's reading of lines 190-91 is also less convincing than the traditional interpretation. He claims that those who "fought in the life-or-death naval battle" are the men whose drowning after the battle gave rise to the trial of the generals. The text gives no hint or suggestion that Charon is talking about this subset of the sailors who fought in the battle. Rather, Charon refers to another subset of those who fought in the battle, the slaves: "I don't take slaves, unless...." So we should stay with the traditional interpretation and the scholia to Frogs 33, which, although not an independent source, accords with our reading of Aristophanes: ("[I]n the previous year, in the archonship of Antigenes, the Athenians... won a naval battle around Arginusae and freed the slaves who had fought along with them").6Our first evidence for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:January 12, 2013 (10:49 am) C:\WPdata\TYPE3202\russell 32,2 062 red.wpd 1 [For document sources and the pseudonyms used, see the entries in D.4 of the Malleson bibliography in this issue. The Wrst is under “Hemma Hos br”.z—zK.B.] 2 [Russell had given Malleson directions: “Festiniog is 3 miles from Blaenau Festiniog, along the road to Port Madoc; our cottage is a quarter of a mile from Festiniog, towards Port Madoc; the (...) inn, the Pengwern Arms, is at our end of the village. You would not Wnd our cottage on any map, but you might Wnd Bryn Llewelyn, a big house next door. Festiniog is on a ridge between two mountain streams, the Teigl and the Cynval” (24 Aug. 1948, ra3 596.200860). Find it at 52 57N32.17ON, 3 56N29.04OW on Google Earth.] 3 [Russell’s later secretary, Christopher Farley, attended the evacuated school.] russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 32 (winter 2012–13): 161–9 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 ocuments THREE PORTRAITS OF BERTRAND RUSSELL AT HOME1 Constance Malleson i.w“bertrand russell at home” (1949) A ysage in ancient times once said that the best and wisest men love ythe ymountains and the sea. So it is perhaps not surprising to Wnd yEngland’s ygreat philosopher, Bertrand Russell, living in a little grey stone cottage on the side of a mountain and within sight of the sea. At a bend in a steep road, you suddenly come upon it: a typically Welsh looking place, for it is situated not far from the village of Llan Ffestiniogz—zin North Wales. It is small-scale country, this north-western corner of Merioneth: small steep hills; small glistening-green oak woods; small compact purple mountains (about 2,000 feet high). Ffestiniog village stands upon a ridge with a deep valley on either side; and a river, with white churning waterfalls, in each valley. From the grey stone terrace in front of Russell’s cottage, the whole Vale of Ffestiniog opens out to the shining estuary and the sea.2 The terrace has three tall, clipped, very prim looking bay trees; and all the cottage’s eight windows and two doors open out onto it; and Russell will tell you (with a lightly sardonic tone in his voice) that there were originally six trees, but that A.yS. Neill’s small scholars cut down three of them. (A.yS. Neill’s famous “experimental” school was evacuated here during the war.3 ) While Russell is himself an advocate of a very great deal of freedom in education, he thinks it is a pity if small children grow up without any knowledge whatever in their heads. At the western end of the terrace, the cottage has a projecting wing and it is January 12, 2013 (10:49 am) C:\WPdata\TYPE3202\russell 32,2 062 red.wpd 162 constance malleson 4 [B.yH. Liddell Hart (1895–1970). Conrad Russell recalled him visiting in “Shaking OT the Family Curse” (interview), The Independent on Sunday, 13 June 1999, pp. 16–17.] 5 [Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars of England Begun in the Year 1641, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1704). The copy is still in Russell’s library.] 6 [It was the unique Doves type that T.yJ. Cobden-Sanderson disposed of in this way in 1916. He died in 1923. Many Doves Press publications remain in Russell’s library.] 7 [1817–1857. Finnish book collector.] 8 [The book was on loan to Russell from Malleson. She later sent a wedding oTering of what is probably the same copy to the Editor and his wife.] 9 [One such stone jar, with a screw-on top, is in ra.] there that Russell’s own small son, Conrad, age twelve, has his bedroom. Its walls are covered with delightful, large, coloured, historical maps of the world; and it once happened that, when the famous military expert of The Times, Liddell Hart,4 was visiting Russell and holding forth about some very remote and little known place, Conrad piped up and corrected him... (shrink)

This is a big-picture book, 2 written with a breadth of focus which I find admirable. It exhibits what's come to be known as the ‘intersubdiscplinary’ approach to philosophy, which is not restricted by traditional boundaries within the discipline but rather proceeds with an eye to all sorts of areas of philosophy where relevant arguments, results, analogies and strategies might be lurking. I approve of this way of doing philosophy; it seems to me that all too often that wheels are (...) reinvented, or crucial points missed, because of a lack of this sort of intersubdisciplinarity.To help guide us through such a broad landscape, this book needed to be well-signposted and clearly written, and it is. It cannot be denied, however, that the ambitious scale of The Nature of Normativity won't be to every taste. For one thing, not everyone likes big pictures. For another, this is a deep, dense and in many ways difficult book, which can only really be appreciated by sitting down with it for hours on end. It will not repay the casual skim-reader, nor is it likely to appeal to those who prefer dipping into philosophy books over reading them wholesale.The book is also long . The view under construction has a great many interlocking elements, including non-reductive normative naturalism, normative realism, a priorist intuitionism, normative internalism, the normativity of intentionality, conceptual-role semantics, contextualism, possible-worlds semantics, and certain ideas about ‘planning’ derived from the recent work of Allan Gibbard. It will be a tough read for specialists who do not share Wedgwood's familiarity with a wide range of subdisciplines, who will either have to content themselves with a superficial reading of many passages or else hunt down the necessary background material to …. (shrink)

There can be no doubt that discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, religion or beliefs should not be tolerated in academia. Surprisingly, however, in recent years, policies of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE), officially introduced to counteract discrimination, have increasingly led to quite the opposite result: the exclusion of individuals who do not share a radical 'woke' ideology on identity politics (feminism, other gender activisms, critical race theory, etc.), and to the suppression of the academic freedom to discuss such dogmas. (...) This subversion of academia — disguised Trojan-horse style as universal human rights advocacy — is unacceptable because academia must be politically neutral and protect freedom of speech, a cornerstone of professional scholarly activity without which universities as we know them will slowly but surely suffocate. Our purpose here is to put together some particularly illustrative cases of such repression in a single book, testifying to a ubiquitous trend within western culture, irreducible to a few isolated complaints. The essays contained here illustrate the abuse of power, censorship and witch-hunts at many universities and research centres in the name of DIE. List of coauthors in alphabetical order: Dorian Abbot, Tomonori Agoh, Gerhard Amendt, Ivar Arpi, David Benatar, Peter Boghossian, Civitas Research Team, David Díaz Pardo de Vera, Pedro Domingos, Janice Fiamengo, Étienne Forest, Jorge Gibert Galassi, Norman Goldstuck, José L. González Quirós, Lawrence M. Krauss, Patrick LaBelle, Martín López Corredoira, Heather Mac Donald, Martin Malmgren, Jordan Peterson, Constantin Polychronakos, Erik. J. Olsson, Philip C. Salzman, Alessandro Strumia, Tom Todd, Andrei Yafaev. (shrink)

Einstein's second postulate (light-speed constancy) is modified in the following manner:(1) as to motion of light emitters, no modification is made;(2) as to motion of light absorbers, if the absorber moves with velocityv with respect to the observer, that observer will attribute to light the velocity (c+v). It is shown, with reference to the original Einstein train example, that such a modification of the second postulate restores to kinematics a concept of distant simultaneity. Thus is indicated the complicated (acausal) behavior (...) that must be attributed to light in order that the simple behavior earlier attributed (1) to matter (nonoccurrence of the Lorentz contraction) may be consistent with all known facts. A reply is made to Grøn's critique (2) of the earlier paper on metric standards. It is concluded that further experimental data are needed to decide the simple-light-complicated-matter versus complicated-light-simple-matter issue. (shrink)

The Parmenides is notorious for the criticisms it directs against Plato's own Theory of Forms, as presented in the middle period. But the second and major portion of the dialogue has generally been avoided, despite its being offered as Plato's response to the problems; the text seems intractably obscure, appearing to consist of a series of bad arguments leading to contradictory conclusions. Carefully analyzing these arguments and the methodological remarks which precede them, Meinwald shows that to understand Plato's response we (...) need to recognize his important distinction between two kinds of predication. Read in the light of this distinction, the arguments can be seen to be sound, and the contradictions merely apparent. Meinwald then proceeds to demonstrate the direct application of Plato's crucial innovation in solving the problems of the first part of the dialogue, including the infamous Third Man. On Meinwald's interpretation, the new distinction is associated with developments in metaphysics which take Plato well beyond the problems commonly thought to tell against Platonism. (shrink)

A scholium in codex Vaticanus graecus 156 provides evidence that Cassius Dio'sRoman Historyonce contained an explicit reference to theludi saecularesofa.d. 204, something that has been denied in recent scholarship.

In the last thirty years there has been a great deal of interest in Plato's late dialogues. However, so far a consensus on the interpretation of these works has failed to emerge. The principal reason for this is that understanding the Parmenides--which introduces the late group--is a necessary precondition for understanding the other late dialogues, and the Parmenides has until now not been at all well understood. ;The first part of the Parmenides notoriously presents a series of problems that face (...) someone holding views reminiscent of the middle dialogues. Plato offers the second part of the dialogue as an exercise needed if one is to go on to get things right in metaphysics. But the exercise consists of arguments whose conclusions are in systematic contradiction with each other. In this dissertation, I aim to show that Plato meant us to develop a certain distinction between two kinds of predication in the light of which the contradictions will be seen to exist only at the grammatical level. The two kinds of predication will emerge as the foundation for a metaphysics which will have outgrown the problems of the first part of the dialogue. (shrink)

Suppose we discovered that all the women in the Slobbovian culture exhibit a strong preference for blue-handled knives and red-handled forks. They would rather starve than eat with utensils of the wrong color. We’d be rightly puzzled, and eager to find an explanation. ‘Well,” these women tell us, “blue-handled knives are snazzier, you know. And just look at them: these red-handled forks are, well, just plain beautiful!” This should not satisfy us. Why do they say this? Their answers may make (...) sense to them, and even to us, once we’ve managed to insert ourselves to some degree into their culture, but that is not the end of it. We want to know why there is a culture with such apparently arbitrary and unmotivated preferences. To us outsiders, the need for an answer stands out, even if the Slobbovians themselves think their answers are self-evident and quite satisfying. Similarly, we may think it is just obvious that laughter is the appropriate response to humor. Why are some female shapes sexy and others not? Isn’t it obvious? Just look at them! But that is not the end of it. The universalities, regularities and trends in our responses to the world do indeed guarantee, trivially, that they are part of “human nature,” but that still leaves the question of why. Something must pay for these extravagant features. What? To answer, we need to adopt an evolutionary point of view, which encourages us to look at all aspects of human nature from the sort of alien, Martian perspective that science thrives on. This perspective, self-consciously objective and bristling with hooks for attachment to the rest of science, is anathema to John Dupré. It reeks of “reductionism” and “scientism” and “economism”. He wants to preserve and even privilege the traditional “explanations” of such features of human nature, not just as part of the story but as a part that excuses us from hunting for deeper, unifying explanations of the same features. Wittgenstein famously said that explanation has to stop somewhere, and Dupré seems to want it to stop just before these curiously invasive evolutionary questions get posed. (shrink)

The world I grew up in believed that change and development in life are part of a continuous process of cause and effect, minutely and patiently sustained throughout the millenniums. With the exception of the initial act of creation ..., the evolution of life on earth was considered to be a slow, steady and ultimately demonstrable process. No sooner did I begin to read history, however, than I began to have my doubts. Human society and living beings, it seemed to (...) me, ought to be excluded from so calm and rational a view. The whole of human development, far from having been a product of steady evolution, seemed subject to only partially explicable and almost invariably violent mutations. Entire cultures and groups of individuals appeared imprisoned for centuries in a static shape which they endured with long-suffering indifference, and then suddenly, for no demonstrable cause, became susceptible to drastic changes and wild surges of development. It was as if the movement of life throughout the ages was not a Darwinian caterpillar but a startled kangaroo, going out towards the future in a series of unpredictable hops, stops, skips and bounds. Indeed, when I came to study physics I had a feeling that the modern concept of energy could perhaps throw more light on the process than any of the more conventional approaches to the subject. It seemed that species, society and individuals behaved more like thunder-clouds than scrubbed, neatly clothed and well-behaved children of reason. Throughout the ages life appeared to build up great invisible charges, like clouds and earth of electricity, until suddenly in a sultry hour the spirit moved, the wind rose, a drop of rain fell acid in the dust, fire flared in the nerve, and drums rolled to produce what we call thunder and lightening in the heavens and chance and change in human society and personality.LAURENS VAN DER POST, The Lost World of the Kalahari. (shrink)

At some point before the late fifth centurya.d.an unidentified writer compiled and affixed to each book of Dio'sRoman Historyan index, most notably comprising a table of contents and an excerpt of the consularfasti. Of dubious provenance these paratexts have played a peripheral role in the editorial history of the work. Bekker and Dindorf, with somewhat puritanical zeal, removed them from the main text of their editions of theRoman Historyin the belief that they were not by Dio's hand. Conversely, the stereotyped (...) edition of Dio's history produced under the auspices of Karl Tauchnitz at Leipzig in 1818 provided Latin translations of the indices, but omitted the Greek. Dio's more recent editors have restored them to their editions of theRoman History, despite questions over their origins. (shrink)