Heroes and villains of world history across cultures

© 2015 Hanke et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedEmergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.This research was supported by grant RG016-P-10 from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (http://www.cckf.org.tw/). Religion Culture Entropy China Democracy Economic histor

“Heroes” and “Villains” of world history across cultures

Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.This research was supported by grant RG016-P-10 from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (http://www.cckf.org.tw/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Tropopause-height feedback and radiative forcing in 2D climate simulations

The climate response of the Northern Hemisphere to the anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing is studied with a zonally-averaged climate model. First, a simple method is proposed to improve the radiative forcing in climate models with a low vertical resolution for the atmospheric dynamics. Then, the sensitivity of the model response to tropopause height parameterization is examined. It is shown that small changes in tropopause height induced by climate warming introduce an important feedback which strongly affects the 2 x CO2 sensitivity at equilibrium. Finally, transient climate evolution is simulated for the time-dependent radiative forcings corresponding to the scenarios BaU and D of the IPCC 1990. The contributions of various greenhouse gases are taken into account with an effective-CO2 method whose validity is shortly discussed. Several transient simulations have been undertaken with different tropopause height parameterizations. The results show further that the potential tropopause-height feedback can significantly influence the model response

Environmental research to support the EU 2020 Vision

The EU’s 2020 vision aims to deliver a bright future for Europe. This can only be achieved in the context of a sustainable, healthy environment. The Advisory Group on Environment (including climate change) sees the need to achieve a new balance between continued support for disciplinary research while at the same time fostering inter-disciplinary approaches to complex issues. Along with understanding the processes leading to global environmental change, must be added an understanding of societal changes and their implications for the quality of environment, and the mechanisms of knowledge transfer and innovation infrastructures that are required to make the 2020 vision a success