From Sociology and Economics to World History

World History has only recently emerged as a distinctive and vibrant field of study. Its origins arose from a cross-fertilization of economics, history, and comparative sociology, and from particular conjunctions of people and places in the 1980s and 1990s. World historians now, thanks to unprecedented access to quantitative historical data and international networks of scholars, can develop increasingly precise, formal, and detailed accounts of changes and comparisons across historical periods. However, our goal is not to create new master narratives or theories that predict a grand historical trajectory for mankind; rather we seek to better understand the similarities and differences among societies, and the likely consequences of those similarities and differences.World History has only recently emerged as a distinctive and vibrant field of study. Its origins arose from a cross-fertilization of economics, history, and comparative sociology, and from particular conjunctions of people and places in the 1980s and 1990s. World historians now, thanks to unprecedented access to quantitative historical data and international networks of scholars, can develop increasingly precise, formal, and detailed accounts of changes and comparisons across historical periods. However, our goal is not to create new master narratives or theories that predict a grand historical trajectory for mankind; rather we seek to better understand the similarities and differences among societies, and the likely consequences of those similarities and differences

Where you look matters for body perception: Preferred gaze location contributes to the body inversion effect

The Body Inversion Effect (BIE; reduced visual discrimination performance for inverted compared to upright bodies) suggests that bodies are visually processed configurally; however, the specific importance of head posture information in the BIE has been indicated in reports of BIE reduction for whole bodies with fixed head position and for headless bodies. Through measurement of gaze patterns and investigation of the causal relation of fixation location to visual body discrimination performance, the present study reveals joint contributions of feature and configuration processing to visual body discrimination. Participants predominantly gazed at the (body-centric) upper body for upright bodies and the lower body for inverted bodies in the context of an experimental paradigm directly comparable to that of prior studies of the BIE. Subsequent manipulation of fixation location indicates that these preferential gaze locations causally contributed to the BIE for whole bodies largely due to the informative nature of gazing at or near the head. Also, a BIE was detected for both whole and headless bodies even when fixation location on the body was held constant, indicating a role of configural processing in body discrimination, though inclusion of the head posture information was still highly discriminative in the context of such processing. Interestingly, the impact of configuration (upright and inverted) to the BIE appears greater than that of differential preferred gaze locations

Social Structure in the Explanation and Prediction of Social Discontinuities: A Response to Lempert's Critique of the Multipath Forecasting Project (MFP)

Response to Lempert: A Response to Multipath Forecastin

The Origins of Western Superiority: A comment on Modes of Meta-History and Duchesne’s Indo-Europeans Article

This is a commentary on Ricardo Duchesne's Forum articl