Synthesis of the elements in stars: forty years of progress

Forty years ago Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle combined what we would now call fragmentary evidence from nuclear physics, stellar evolution and the abundances of elements and isotopes in the solar system as well as a few stars into a synthesis of remarkable ingenuity. Their review provided a foundation for forty years of research in all of the aspects of low energy nuclear experiments and theory, stellar modeling over a wide range of mass and composition, and abundance studies of many hundreds of stars, many of which have shown distinct evidence of the processes suggested by B2FH. In this review we summarize progress in each of these fields with emphasis on the most recent developments

Identifying and Defining the Dimensions of Community Capacity to Provide a Basis for Measurement

Although community capacity is a central concern of community development experts, the concept requires clarification. Because of the potential importance of community capacity to health promotion, the Division of Chronic Disease Control and Community Intervention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), convened a symposium in December 1995 with the hope that a consensus might emerge regarding the dimensions that are integral to community capacity. This article describes the dimensions that the symposium participants suggested as central to the construct, including participation and leadership, skills, resources, social and interorganizational networks, sense of community, understanding of community history, community power, community values, and critical reflection. The dimensions are not exhaustive but may serve as a point of departure to extend and refine the construct and to operationalize ways to assess capacity in communities.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67070/2/10.1177_109019819802500303.pd

Militarization and social development in the Third World

In this study we integrated the modernization and dependency theories of development to suggest the ways whereby militarization can affect development. We examined the effects of three components of militarization highlighted in these theories on the social development of ninety-two developing countries. Overall, our findings support the dependency theory's emphasis on the detrimental impact of international trade on disadvantaged nations. There is a significant negative correlation between arms import and social development. Arms export and indigenous spending are correlated with social development in the expected directions but their beta coefficients are not significant. The diverse ways these three aspects of militarization have been shown to affect social development help to explain some of the conflicting findings in the literature and point to the need to study these variables in their disaggregated form.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69141/2/10.1177_144078339503100105.pd

Evaluating the effectiveness of agricultural adaptation to climate change in preindustrial society

The effectiveness of agricultural adaptation determines the vulnerability of this sector to climate change, particularly during the preindustrial era. However, this effectiveness has rarely been quantitatively evaluated, specifically at a large spatial and long-term scale. The present study covers this case of preindustrial society in AD 1500–1800. Given the absence of technological innovations in this time frame, agricultural production was chiefly augmented by cultivating more land (land input) and increasing labor input per land unit (labor input). Accordingly, these two methods are quantitatively examined. Statistical results show that within the study scale, land input is a more effective approach of mitigating climatic impact than labor input. Nonetheless, these observations collectively improve Boserup's theory from the perspective of a large spatial and long-term scale.postprin

Different paths to the modern state in Europe: the interaction between domestic political economy and interstate competition

Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era, for others revenues stagnated or even declined, and these variations motivated alternative hypotheses for determinants of fiscal and state capacity. In this study we test the basic hypotheses in the existing literature making use of the large date set we have compiled for all of the leading states across the continent. We find strong empirical support for two prevailing threads in the literature, arguing respectively that interstate wars and changes in economic structure towards an urbanized economy had positive fiscal impact. Regarding the main point of contention in the theoretical literature, whether it was representative or authoritarian political regimes that facilitated the gains in fiscal capacity, we do not find conclusive evidence that one performed better than the other. Instead, the empirical evidence we have gathered lends supports to the hypothesis that when under pressure of war, the fiscal performance of representative regimes was better in the more urbanized-commercial economies and the fiscal performance of authoritarian regimes was better in rural-agrarian economie

Dreams and nightmares of liberal international law: capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony

This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and does so via conceptualising global juridical relations as a site of contestation over questions of economic and social justice. By sketching aspects of a historical interaction between capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony, the article offers a critical account of the limits of liberal international law, and attempts to recover some ground for thinking about the emancipatory potential of international law more generally

Measuring the Intrapersonal Component of Psychological Empowerment: Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Sociopolitical Control Scale

The Sociopolitical Control Scale (SPCS) is a widely used measure of the intrapersonal component of psychological empowerment. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) were conducted with data from two samples to test the hypothesized structure of the SPCS, the potential effects of method bias on the measure's psychometric properties, and whether a revised version of the scale (SPCS‐R) yielded improved model fit. Sample 1 included 316 randomly selected community residents of the Midwestern United States. Sample 2 included 750 community residents of the Northeastern U.S. Results indicated that method bias from the use of negatively worded items had a significant effect on the factor structure of the SPCS. CFA of the SPCS‐R, in which negatively worded items were rephrased so that all statements were positively worded, supported the measure's hypothesized two‐factor structure (i.e., leadership competence and policy control). Subscales of the SPCS‐R were found reliable and related in expected ways with measures of community involvement. Implications of the study for empowerment‐based research and practice are described, and strategies to further develop the SPCS are discussed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117223/1/ajcp9070.pd

Law of denial

Law’s claim of mastery over past political violence is frequently undermined by reversals of that relationship of mastery, so that the violence of the law, and especially its symbolic violence, becomes easily incorporated into longues durées of political violence, rather than mastering them, settling them, or providing closure. Doing justice to the past, therefore, requires a political and theoretical attunement to the ways in which law, in purportedly attempting to address past political violence, inscribes itself into contemporary contexts of violence. While this may be limited to an analysis of how law is an effect of and affects the political, theoretically this attunement can be further refined by means of a critique of dynamics that are internal to law itself and that have to do with how law understands its own historicity, as well as its relationship to history and historiography. This article aims to pursue such a critique, taking as its immediate focus the ECHR case of Perinçek v Switzerland, with occasional forays into debates around the criminalisation of Armenian genocide denialism in France. The Perinçek case concerned Switzerland's criminalisation of the denial of the Armenian genocide, and concluded in 2015 after producing two judgments, first by the Second Chamber, and then by the Grand Chamber of the ECHR. However, although they both found for the applicant, the two benches had very different lines of reasoning, and notably different conceptions regarding the relationship between law and history. I proceed by tracing the shifting status of 'history' and 'historians' in these two judgments, and paying attention to the deferrals, disclaimers and ellipses that structure law's relation to history. This close reading offers the opportunity for a critical reappraisal of the relationship between law, denial and violence: I propose that the symbolic violence of the law operative in memory laws is a product of that which remains unresolved in law's understanding of historicity (including its own), its self-understanding vis-à-vis the task of historiography, and its inability to respond to historical violence without inscribing itself into a history of violence, a process regarding which it remains in denial