Warren McCulloch and the British cyberneticians

Warren McCulloch was a significant influence on a number of British cyberneticians, as some British pioneers in this area were on him. He interacted regularly with most of the main figures on the British cybernetics scene, forming close friendships and collaborations with several, as well as mentoring others. Many of these interactions stemmed from a 1949 visit to London during which he gave the opening talk at the inaugural meeting of the Ratio Club, a gathering of brilliant, mainly young, British scientists working in areas related to cybernetics. This paper traces some of these relationships and interaction

James Hogg

No abstract available

Crystal Eastman and the Internationalist Beginnings of American Civil Liberties

The modern American civil liberties movement famously began with the United States\u27s intervention in World War I. Yet these beginnings have long raised a conundrum for civil liberties historians. Why did the American civil liberties movement arise precisely when so many sophisticated legal and political thinkers began to call into question the truth value of abstract rights claims? The puzzling rise of civil liberties in an age of pragmatic skepticism is all the more startling given that early leaders of the civil liberties movement were themselves leading rights skeptics. This Article offers a new interpretation of the rise of the modern American civil liberties movement. Our ostensibly domestic civil liberties movement--and indeed, the phrase civil liberties itself--has its roots in a pre-World War I international law cosmopolitanism. In particular, the social movement that coalesced around the phrase civil liberties developed as a group of self-consciously internationalist organizations. Led by people such as Crystal Eastman, a little-remembered, charismatic, progressive-era reformer and radical, these organizations had begun to question not just the abstract metaphysical truth of rights claims but also the usefulness of that other great abstraction of nineteenth-century law: sovereignty. The civil liberties movement in American law thus did indeed emerge out of a pragmatist critique of abstract legal fictions. The relevant abstraction, however, was not so much the formal concept of rights as the formal concept of nation-state sovereignty. With American intervention in World War I, obligations of loyalty to the nation-state compelled American internationalists such as Eastman, her colleague Roger Baldwin, and the fledgling American Civil Liberties Union to reframe their critique of sovereignty in terms made available by the constituent documents of American nationalism

Reminiscences on Influential Papers

Reminiscences on Parallel evaluation of multi-join queries. (Proc. SIGMOD Conf. 1995), Annita Wilschut, Jan Flokstra, Peter M.G. Apers

Global influences and local environments: Forestry and forest conservation in New Zealand, 1850s-1925.

This article examines the multiple factors that shaped the establishment of forest conservation and tree-planting in the colony of New Zealand. It presents a new perspective on forest history in New Zealand from the 1850s to the 1920s by examining the interplay of local and global factors in the development of forestry, while also suggesting future research topics in this area. Using the case-study of New Zealand, as an ancillary focus the article presents new interpretations of the exchange and introduction of forestry ideas, suggesting a need to re-examine the importance of locality in the period leading up to the emergence of ‘empire forestry’ in the twentieth century. With this in mind, it takes as one of its perspectives the work of historian of science David Livingstone, who has emphasised the importance of local factors in shaping the spread of scientific ideas. In light of Livingstone’s ideas, we demonstrate that while it makes sense to consider New Zealand forest policy both nationally and internationally, there were also significant local variations in policy according to geography, politics and other factors. These included uneven forest distribution throughout the country, slower growth-rates of indigenous trees and the impact of geography on forest removal and conservation. As well, long-standing political aversion to government interference in society restricted the role of the state in active forest management, giving greater latitude to private tree-planters. Meanwhile, New Zealand’ smaller government and population offered greater power to individuals than perhaps would be open to those living in larger societies with bigger government bureaucracies