“Johnson Forever!” Revisiting a Hero of the Seven Years War

William Johnson moved to New York from his ancestral homeland Ireland in 1738 and soon became one of the most influential and prosperous colonists of his time. As a trader, land developer, speculator and government official, he co-operated extensively with the tribes of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. Considered a fair and honest man by these people, Johnson developed close personal and economic relationships with many of them, especially within the Mohawk tribes. So when the British and French clashed between 1744 and 1748 (King George’s War), the New York colonial government turned to Johnson

A Theory of Expropriation and Deviations From Perfect Capital Mobility

This paper develops a theory of capital movements in the presence of potential expropriation. The threat of expropriation is derived from utility maximizing behavior by host countries. Potential investors, anticipating this behavior, modify their investment plans to avoid expropriation. When- ever the host country faces competitive foreign investors expropriation represents part of a time-consistent but suboptimal plan of the type discussed by Kydland and Prescott (1977). The consequent equilibrium may be characterized by a number of distortions. In the simplest model we analyze, a host country faces a large number of potential, competitive foreign investors. We explore the implications of the threat of expropriation for shadow pricing in the host country and for the optimal technology choice by potential investors. We consider variants of the model in which the potential investor is in a monopoly position vis-a-vis the host country, in which the foreign investment project is subject to risk which is unresolved at the time of the expropriation decision, and in which factors affecting the optimality of expropriation by the host country are unresolved at the time of the investment decision. The larger the penalty incumbent on the host country in the event of expropriation, the greater its welfare in the simple, competitive model. When the foreign investor is a monopolist, however, this result is reversed.

The Pure Theory of Country Risk

This paper attempts to survey, and to put into perspective, recent lterature that has analyzed the nature of credit relations between developed and developing countries.This analysis has made use of recent advances in the economics of information and strategic interaction. Traditional concepts of solvency and liquidity are of little help in understanding problems of soverign debt. Creditors do not have the means to seize the assets of a borrower in default. Hence the borrower who is expected eventually to repay his debts should be able to borrow to meet any current debt-service obligations. A problem that is essential to a theory of international lending is that of enforcement. The difficulty is one of ensuring that the two sides of a loan contract adhere to it, in particular that the borrower repays the lender and the lenders can commit themselves to penalize the borrower if he does not.

Religious Studies Encyclopedism: A recent history

As academic reference librarians, we need to historically situate the reference sources we use within changing scholarly disciplines. Mircea Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion, for example, is an important text in religious studies, but it is not a neutral text. Rather, it clearly reflects certain intellectual commitments and discursive strategies that need to be situated within histories of scholarship. Failure on the part of librarians to contextualize the perspectives of a reference source is problematic, as it leaves the assumptions of the text unchallenged. More constructively, librarians need to problematize the agendas of reference sources, and make salient their discursive positions

A Comparative Analysis of the Use of GitHub by Librarians and Non-Librarians

Objective – GitHub is a popular tool that allows software developers to collaborate and share their code on the web. Librarians have adopted GitHub to support their own work, sharing code in support of their libraries. This paper asks: How does librarians’ use of GitHub compare to that of other users? Methods – To retrieve quantitative data on GitHub users, we queried the GitHub APIs (application programming interfaces). By assembling data on librarians’ use of GitHub, as well as on a comparison group, we provided preliminary comparisons of these two samples. We analyzed and visualized this data across a number of variables to offer salient insights as to how librarians compare to randomly selected GitHub users. Results – Librarians regularly use a more diverse range of programming languages than the comparison group, hinting at a broad range of possible uses of code in libraries. While the librarians’ sample group did not demonstrate statistically significant differences from the comparison group on most measures of activity and popularity, they scored significantly higher in reach and productivity than the comparison group. This could be due to librarians’ greater longevity on GitHub, as well as their greater investment in GitHub as a tool for sharing. Conclusion – Our data suggest that librarians are actively building their libraries with code and sharing the results. While it was unclear whether librarians were more active or popular on GitHub than the comparison group, it was clear that they demonstrated statistically significant outperformance in terms of reach and productivity. To explain these findings, we hypothesized that librarians’ embrace of GitHub is in line with widely held values of “openness” in the library profession

Determinants of habitat and site use by turnstones and purple sandpipers in N.E. England, and possible effects of the removal of coastal nutrients

Purple Sandpipers and Turnstones were studied on the coast of south Northumberland, with regard to the possible effects of reductions in sewage inputs into inshore waters along the Northumberland coast as a result of new European legislation. Multivariate analysis of bird density in relation to 33 habitat variables indicated that Purple Sandpiper distribution was positively correlated with the abundance of intertidal musselbeds, but negatively correlated with raptor density. Turnstone density was positively correlated with several intertidal habitats such as bare and barnacle-covered rock, as well as the amount of detached wrack deposited on the strandline. Analysis of stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in particulate organic matter in inshore waters indicated that sewage contributed up to 60% of the total organic matter in the immediate vicinity of outfalls, and hence probably supported increased intertidal invertebrate densities. Purple Sandpiper numbers were unlikely to be limited by food resources, but birds sought to feed in areas that offered the highest food intake rates, in order to reduce the time spent feeding and therefore minimise the risk of predation by raptors. Social status determined where birds could feed, with larger and older birds excluding subordinates to poorer feeding areas. Social status in Turnstones was determined by sex and age. By feeding on the richest intertidal food resources, dominant individuals (males and adults) minimised the time spent foraging on ephemeral deposits of strandline wrack over high water, which carried a greater risk of predation. Dominant individuals of both species were able to carry less stored fat and hence improved their chances of escaping attacks by raptors. While both species are unlikely to decline in numbers as a direct response to lower food densities, subsequent changes in foraging behaviour and distribution could result in greater mortality

Seeing Library Data: A Prototype Data Visualization Application for Librarians

Visualizations can add value to raw library data. Tools that programmatically make such visualizations interactive can further increase the value of this data, by giving librarians visual tools to analyze their data sets. To demonstrate these benefits, Kingsborough Community College Library built SeeCollections (http://b7jl.org/seecollections), a web application that visualizes our libraries’ collections of books and ebooks. This article discusses the how SeeCollections gathers data from Kingsborough’s discovery layer API (Application Programming Interface), and transforms this data to create visualizations for the web. SeeCollections is a lightweight, proof-of-concept data application based on a vendor API. API data is often accessible in academic libraries, but is frequently underutilized. SeeCollections was built to demonstrate the immediate value of these API data sources to Kingsborough librarians, by providing a visual interface to discovery layer data. Keeping in mind the broader literature on data visualization, this article will explore how SeeCollections was built

Pragmatic Encroachment : entailments and evaluation

Pragmatic Encroachment, the view that knowledge is sensitive to one’s practical situation, is a marked departure from traditional epistemology. A popular way of endorsing it requires that one’s evidence be practically adequate. I derive the following entailments from this view: one can gain knowledge that p by getting evidence against p, there is a significantly stronger evidential requirement for knowing atheism than there is for Christianity, and some tiny bets can bring about very strong evidential requirements. I argue that these entailments count as evidence against Pragmatic Encroachment.Philosoph