Taming the waterways: The Europeanization of Southern Québec's riverside landscapes during the 16th–18th centuries

The arrival of Europeans in the New World effected the interaction of 2 temperate biogeographical eco-zones: the Palaearctic and Nearctic. Alfred Crosby has hypothesized that the success of the Europeans as imperialists was due, in part, to the ability of their introduced biota to bring about the collapse of the indigenous populations and local ecosystems, leading to the formation of Neo-European eco-spaces. Through a comparison of paleontological and environmental archaeological data from southern Québec, Canada, we examined Crosby's ecological imperialism model and assessed the biological impact of colonialism on the physical landscape during the 16th to early 18th centuries. The Intendant's Palace site in Québec City is employed as a case study and diachronically contextualized with data from contemporaneous sites in the region. The Europeanization of the landscape as a result of settlement construction, subsistence, and commodification was evidenced through signs of deforestation as well as the arrival of socioeconomic taxa. The biological transfer of European species did not appear to herald the collapse of local ecosystems but rather the establishment of an ecological melting pot along the early colonial waterways of southern Québec

Lovers and Other Supernatural Beings

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Chinese Enterprise Reform as a Market Process

The reform of China's enterprise system increasingly reflects the outcome of China's emerging property rights market. We distinguish between a centrally-directed reform strategy, with characteristics similar to those of a Pigouvian tax, and a market-driven reform process, which captures the essential features of a Coasian approach to social cost. The Coase Theorem postulates that eliminating transaction costs and attaching well specified property rights to public goods that generate externalities will allow uncoordinated economic agents to negotiate institutional arrangements that produce socially efficient allocation of resources. Extending Coase's reasoning to the case of socialist transition ' we argue that reforms that expand competition, move toward well-specified assignment of ownership rights to public enterprises, and reduce transaction costs will motivate the "ultimate" owners, including officials of national and sub-national government agencies, to reconfigure their assets or to combine their assets with those of other jurisdictions and/or private investors to create more efficient ownership arrangements. We review the extent to which China's reforms have established the conditions for an effective market in ownership rights to industrial property. We tabulate progress from 1 980 to present along the three major analytic dimensions inherent in Coase's analysis: competition, property rights, and transaction costs. We conclude that the sheer size and diversity of China's industrial economy will motivate a continuation of decentralized reform initiatives. To support this Coasian reform process, central and provincial governments need to expand initiatives to clarify property rights, particularly the right of alienation, reduce impediments to competition, and facilitate the reduction of transaction costs.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39466/3/wp76.pd

Further Holographic Investigations of Big Bang Singularities

We further explore the quantum dynamics near past cosmological singularities in anisotropic Kasner-AdS solutions using gauge/gravity duality. The dual description of the bulk evolution involves N=4 super Yang-Mills on the contracting branch of an anisotropic de Sitter space and is well defined. We compute two-point correlators of Yang-Mills operators of large dimensions using spacelike geodesics anchored on the boundary. The correlator between two points separated in a direction with negative Kasner exponent p always exhibits a pole at horizon scales, in any dimension, which we interpret as a dual signature of the classical bulk singularity. We find evidence that the pole is absent at finite coupling in the dual field theory, indicating the singularity is resolved.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures. Version 3: added discussion on the validity of the geodesic approximatio