Charles Tilly as a Theorist of Nationalism

This paper considers Charles Tilly as an important but underappreciated theorist of nationalism. Tilly’s theory of nationalism emerged from the “bellicist” strand of his earlier work on state-formation and later incorporated a concern with performance, stories, and cultural modeling. Yet despite the turn to culture in Tilly’s later work, his theory of nationalism remained state-centered, materialist, and instrumentalist—a source of both its power and its limitations

Enduring Legacy? Charles Tilly and Durable Inequality

This article assesses Charles Tilly’s Durable Inequality and traces its influence. In writing Durable Inequality, Tilly sought to shift the research agenda of stratification scholars. But the book’s initial impact was disappointing. In recent years, however, its influence has grown, suggesting a more enduring legacy

The Potential of Insect Farming to Increase Food Security

Insect protein production through ‘mini-livestock farming’ has enormous potential to reduce the level of undernutrition in critical areas across the world. Sustainable insect farming could contribute substantially to increased food security, most especially in areas susceptible to environmental stochasticity. Entomophagy has long been acknowledged as an underutilised strategy to address issues of food security. This chapter reviews and provides a synthesis of the literature surrounding the potential of insect farming to alleviate food security while promoting food sovereignty and integrating social acceptability. These are immediate and current problems of food security and nutrition that must be solved to meet the UNDP Sustainable Development Goals

Thermodynamics of Heat Shock Response

Production of heat shock proteins are induced when a living cell is exposed to a rise in temperature. The heat shock response of protein DnaK synthesis in E.coli for temperature shifts from temperature T to T plus 7 degrees, respectively to T minus 7 degrees is measured as function of the initial temperature T. We observe a reversed heat shock at low T. The magnitude of the shock increases when one increase the distance to the temperature $T_0 \approx 23^o$, thereby mimicking the non monotous stability of proteins at low temperature. Further we found that the variation of the heat shock with T quantitatively follows the thermodynamic stability of proteins with temperature. This suggest that stability related to hot as well as cold unfolding of proteins is directly implemented in the biological control of protein folding. We demonstrate that such an implementation is possible in a minimalistic chemical network.Comment: To be published in Physical Review Letter

Interpreting Sequence-Levenshtein distance for determining error type and frequency between two embedded sequences of equal length

Levenshtein distance is a commonly used edit distance metric, typically applied in language processing, and to a lesser extent, in molecular biology analysis. Biological nucleic acid sequences are often embedded in longer sequences and are subject to insertion and deletion errors that introduce frameshift during sequencing. These frameshift errors are due to string context and should not be counted as true biological errors. Sequence-Levenshtein distance is a modification to Levenshtein distance that is permissive of frameshift error without additional penalty. However, in a biological context Levenshtein distance needs to accommodate both frameshift and weighted errors, which Sequence-Levenshtein distance cannot do. Errors are weighted when they are associated with a numerical cost that corresponds to their frequency of appearance. Here, we describe a modification that allows the use of Levenshtein distance and Sequence-Levenshtein distance to appropriately accommodate penalty-free frameshift between embedded sequences and correctly weight specific error types.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Introduction

May you live in interesting times, runs the legendary Chinese curese. These are interesting times: almost anything can happen except a return to the delicate but enduring balance between two blocs that marked international relations for nearly half a century after World War II. The possibilities include nuclear war, not in the form of the long-feared mutual destruction of the Soviet Union and the United States, but as a last resort in the course of escalating regional conflicts in the Middle East or South Asia. In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, United Nations inspectors found evidence of strong steps toward the production of nuclear weapons in Iraq, a country whose leaders did not hesitate to rain missiles on noncombatant Israel during their struggle to hold Kuwait; the same science is available to many other small, rich despots throughout the world. While the chances that two of the world\u27s largest countries would annihilate each other simultaneously have surely receded, the risk of nuclear war has by no means vanished

Tilly's Technical Accounts and Standard Stories Explored in Financial Markets:The Case of the Istanbul Stock Exchange

In this article, I follow the lead opened up by Tilly (1999, 2002) who was interested in people's storytelling. I do so by looking at sense-making and the legitimacy narratives of market actors in the Istanbul Stock Exchange. Tilly (2006, 2008) himself walked the narrative path and investigated Why and how people give reasons and how people attribute Credit and Blame to other's actions. These books provide insights into people's storytelling in the everyday situations of the home, courtrooms, hospitals, and so on. Nevertheless, Tilly's faith in the prevalence of technical accounts as modes of explanation in intra and inter organisational settings, and superior stories as mode of communication between expert givers and non-specialized receivers, seems to ignore informational uncertainties, intra and inter organisational hierarchies and conflicts pertinent to organisations. It is these factors that push standard stories (Tilly, 1999) into the forefront at the expense of technical stories within the story exchanges of market actors. I demonstrate this by presenting a sample of story exchanges from the Istanbul Stock Exchange under situations of informational uncertainties and organisational conflicts