Political economy in prehistory: A marxist approach to pacific sequences

Development of strong leaders and social stratification in prehistory is suitable for a political economy approach to the longue durée. Our goal is to encourage archaeologists to formulate prehistoric research that draws on historical materialism, the Marxist reasoning for understanding political economy. Three prehistoric cases from the Pacific (Lapita, Vanuatu, and Hawai‘i) help us evaluate the steps required to do this. Most importantly, we identify economic bottlenecks (constriction points) based on property rights for land or on production and trade of prestige goods. Resources can be mobilized by emergent elites at such bottlenecks to support strategies that enmesh land managers, captains, warriors, and priests to centralize power. A political economy approach in prehistory can help explain striking parallels observed for independent sequences as well as conjunctures and divergences in specific world culture areas

Thermal interquark potentials for bottomonium using NRQCD from the HAL QCD method

We report progress results from our calculation of the interquark potential of bottomonium at non-zero temperature using the HAL QCD method. We use NRQCD correlation functions of non-localmesonic -wave states to obtain the central potential as a function of temperature. These resultshave been obtained using our anisotropic 2+1 flavour "Generation 2" FASTSUM ensembles

Oral Advocacy Before the United States Supreme Court: Does It Affect the Justices\u27 Decisions?

Our empirical investigation focuses on two areas. First, we are interested in the quality of the oral advocacy presented to the Court, especially in terms of its etiology, as well as its effectiveness. We investigate these questions empirically by utilizing notes taken by Blackmun during oral arguments while he sat on the Court. Specifically, we here utilize the grades that Justice Blackmun assigned to each attorney’s oral arguments. This information allows us to answer two related questions: (1) why do some attorneys make better arguments before the Court; and (2) does the quality of oral advocacy influence who wins and loses? Second, we turn our attention to the information the Justices elicit about themselves during oral arguments. We analyze data on how often Justice Blackmun paid attention to the views expressed by his brethren during oral arguments (by examining when and why he recorded the comments of a particular colleague during orals) and the factors that led him to pay attention to some, but not all, of his colleagues. Additionally, we utilize Blackmun’s notes to demonstrate that what transpired during oral arguments provided him with an indication of whether his colleagues would vote to affirm or reverse the lower court decision at issue. We do so through an examination of when Justice Blackmun attempted to predict the votes of his colleagues in his oral argument notes. The Article proceeds as follows. In the next two Parts, we take up our first set of questions, which focuses on whether experienced and resourceful attorneys provide better arguments and whether arguments presented by counsel can affect decisions Justices make. Part IV focuses on whether Justices attempt to learn about their colleagues during oral arguments and whether such information affects the coalition-formation process that follows the arguments. Finally, we analyze whether what transpires during oral arguments can help a Justice make predictions about how a case will ultimately be decided

Bottomonium spectral widths at nonzero temperature using maximum likelihood

We present progress results from the Fastsum collaboration’s programme to determine the spectrum of the bottomonium system as a function of temperature using a variety of approaches. Inthese proceedings, the Maximum Likelihood approach is used with an Ansatz comprising of a Gaussian spectral function for the ground state. Fastsum anisotropic lattices with 2 + 1 dynamicalquark flavours were used with temperatures ranging from 47 to 375 MeV

Human Sensory LTP Predicts Memory Performance and Is Modulated by the BDNF Val66Met Polymorphism

Background: Long-term potentiation (LTP) is recognised as a core neuronal process underlying long-term memory. However, a direct relationship between LTP and human memory performance is yet to be demonstrated. The first aim of the current study was thus to assess the relationship between LTP and human long-term memory performance. With this also comes an opportunity to explore factors thought to mediate the relationship between LTP and long-term memory. The second aim of the current study was to explore the relationship between LTP and memory in groups differing with respect to brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) Val66Met; a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) implicated in memory function.Methods: Participants were split into three genotype groups (Val/Val, Val/Met, Met/Met) and were presented with both an EEG paradigm for inducing LTP-like enhancements of the visually-evoked response, and a test of visual memory.Results: The magnitude of LTP 40 min after induction was predictive of long-term memory performance. Additionally, the BDNF Met allele was associated with both reduced LTP and reduced memory performance.Conclusions: The current study not only presents the first evidence for a relationship between sensory LTP and human memory performance, but also demonstrates how targeting this relationship can provide insight into factors implicated in variation in human memory performance. It is anticipated that this will be of utility to future clinical studies of disrupted memory function

The Astropy Problem

The Astropy Project (http://astropy.org) is, in its own words, "a community effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python and foster interoperability between Python astronomy packages." For five years this project has been managed, written, and operated as a grassroots, self-organized, almost entirely volunteer effort while the software is used by the majority of the astronomical community. Despite this, the project has always been and remains to this day effectively unfunded. Further, contributors receive little or no formal recognition for creating and supporting what is now critical software. This paper explores the problem in detail, outlines possible solutions to correct this, and presents a few suggestions on how to address the sustainability of general purpose astronomical software

The historiography of archaeology: exploring theory, contingency and rationality

From the 1990s onwards the history of archaeology has been enjoying something of a vogue. The publication of the five-volume Encyclopedia of the History of Archaeology (Murray 1999, 2001) has greatly expanded our store of biographies and national histories, the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology has provided a much needed forum for research, as has the History of Archaeology Research Network (HARN), and the Archives of European Archaeology project has re-focused our attention on how much of the history of archaeology in Europe has still to be written. During the same period archaeologists have continued to justify and to advocate the significance of ‘novel’ approaches to archaeology through partial histories of the discipline (the most notable recent examples being those associated with the revival of ‘Darwinian archaeologies’ such as Lyman, O’Brien and Dunnell 1997). Other agendas have been advanced through the production of alternative histories of national archaeologies (e.g. Patterson 1995), the role of women (e.g. Diaz-Andreu and Sorrensen 1998) and of amateurs (e.g. Kehoe and Emmerichs 1999)