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Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I (Studies in German History #22)
by Ulrike Strasser Hartmut Berghoff, Frank BiessTraditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating research into German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific’s overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.
Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples
by Omer BartovThe conflict between Israel and Palestine has raised a plethora of unanswered questions, generated seemingly irreconcilable narratives, and profoundly transformed the land’s physical and political geography. This volume seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the links between the region that is now known as Israel and Palestine and its peoples—both those that live there as well as those who relate to it as a mental, mythical, or religious landscape. Engaging the perspectives of a multidisciplinary, international group of scholars, it is an urgent collective reflection on the bonds between people and a place, whether real or imagined, tangible as its stones or ephemeral as the hopes and longings it evokes.
Embodying Borders: A Migrant’s Right to Health, Universal Rights and Local Policies (EASA Series #41)
by Laura Ferrero, Chiara Quagliariello Ana Cristina VargasBased on extensive field research, the essays in this volume illuminate the experiences of migrants from their own point of view, providing a critical understanding of the complex social reality in which each experience is grounded. Access to medical care for migrants is a fundamental right which is often ignored. The book provides a critical understanding of the social reality in which social inequalities are grounded and offers the opportunity to show that right to health does not correspond uniquely with access to healthcare.
Representing 21st-Century Migration in Europe: Performing Borders, Identities and Texts
by Nelson González Ortega Ana Belén Martínez GarcíaThe 21st century has witnessed some of the largest human migrations in history. Europe in particular has seen a major influx of refugees, redefining notions of borders and national identity. This interdisciplinary volume brings together leading international scholars of migration from perspectives as varied as literature, linguistics, area and cultural studies, media and communication, visual arts, and film studies. Together, they offer innovative interpretations of migrants and contemporary migration to Europe, enriching today’s political and media landscape, and engaging with the ongoing debate on forced mobility and rights of both extra-European migrants and European citizens.
Recent Advances in Logo Detection Using Machine Learning Paradigms: Theory and Practice (Intelligent Systems Reference Library #255)
by Yen-Wei Chen Xiang Ruan Rahul Kumar JainThis book presents the current trends in deep learning-based object detection framework with a focus on logo detection tasks. It introduces a variety of approaches, including attention mechanisms and domain adaptation for logo detection, and describes recent advancement in object detection frameworks using deep learning. We offer solutions to the major problems such as the lack of training data and the domain-shift issues. This book provides numerous ways that deep learners can use for logo recognition, including: Deep learning-based end-to-end trainable architecture for logo detection Weakly supervised logo recognition approach using attention mechanisms Anchor-free logo detection framework combining attention mechanisms to precisely locate logos in the real-world images Unsupervised logo detection that takes into account domain-shift issues from synthetic to real-world images Approach for logo detection modeling domain adaption task in the context of weakly supervised learning to overcome the lack of object-level annotation problem. The merit of our logo recognition technique is demonstrated using experiments, performance evaluation, and feature distribution analysis utilizing different deep learning frameworks. The book is directed to professors, researchers, practitioners in the field of engineering, computer science, and related fields as well as anyone interested in using deep learning techniques and applications in logo and various object detection tasks.
Slurry Transport Using Centrifugal Pumps
by Václav Matoušek Robert Visintainer Lionel Pullum Anders SellgrenBased on the industry leading short course “Transportation of Solids using Centrifugal Pumps,” founded by Dr. Kenneth Wilson and Graeme Addie, and hosted by the GIW Industries Hydraulic Laboratory, this expanded fourth edition has been extensively updated by the international team of engineers and authors who inherited this legacy and continue its development to the present day. Focusing on the hydraulic design of slurry pipelines, the pumps that power them, and the interactions between pumps and systems, it retains the classroom tested balance of theoretical development and practical engineering which have made it a slurry transport classic. The topics covered are important to slurry system engineers for the optimization of new designs, as well as the operators of existing systems, who may need to calculate and plan for changing conditions from day to day. Updates to the fourth edition include:· Careful formulation of the theoretical concepts, providing greater clarity of slurry flow dynamics, including a new chapter on the principles and characterization of slurry flows. · Expansion of the 4-Component Models for settling slurry pipeline flow and pump solids effect, based on an extensive series of full-sized tests.· An expanded treatment of complex slurries, including a broader discussion of non-Newtonian fluids and their interaction with coarse particles. · A new chapter on test methods, presenting an overview of slurry system instrumentation, modern techniques for characterizing slurry rheology, and practical advice for planning and executing a slurry test.· An overview of advances in the computational modeling of slurries, including an in-depth parametric study of slurry pump wear and operating cost. The authors highlight methods for achieving energy efficiency, which are crucial to the effective use of scarce resources, given the foundational role of slurry transport systems in the energy intensive industries of mining and dredging. Key concepts are supported with case studies and worked examples. Slurry Transport Using Centrifugal Pumps, fourth edition, is both methodical and in-depth. It is ideal as a teaching tool for classroom or self-directed learning domains, and valuable as a design guide for engineer practitioners at all experience levels.
Tristan's Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner
by Adrian DaubDas Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art”—famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well known, however, are Wagner’s strange theories on sexuality—like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference. Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other emerging fields of study that informed Wagner’s thinking, Adrian Daub traces the dual influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d’Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner’s death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan’s shadow.
Regulation vs. Litigation: Perspectives from Economics and Law (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report)
by Daniel P. KesslerThe efficacy of various political institutions is the subject of intense debate between proponents of broad legislative standards enforced through litigation and those who prefer regulation by administrative agencies. This book explores the trade-offs between litigation and regulation, the circumstances in which one approach may outperform the other, and the principles that affect the choice between addressing particular economic activities with one system or the other. Combining theoretical analysis with empirical investigation in a range of industries, including public health, financial markets, medical care, and workplace safety, Regulation versus Litigation sheds light on the costs and benefits of two important instruments of economic policy.
Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change
by Ira ShorIra Shor is a pioneer in the field of critical education who for over twenty years has been experimenting with learning methods. His work creatively adapts the ideas of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire for North American classrooms. In Empowering Education Shor offers a comprehensive theory and practice for critical pedagogy. For Shor, empowering education is a student-centered, critical and democratic pedagogy for studying any subject matter and for self and social change. It takes shape as a dialogue in which teachers and students mutually investigate everyday themes, social issues, and academic knowledge. Through dialogue and problem-posing, students become active agents of their learning. This book shows how students can develop as critical thinkers, inspired learners, skilled workers, and involved citizens. Shor carefully analyzes obstacles to and resources for empowering education, suggesting ways for teachers to transform traditional approaches into critical and democratic ones. He offers many examples and applications for the elementary grades through college and adult education.
Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England
by D. Vance SmithPeople in the Middle Ages had chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, and even purgatory—but they were still unable to talk about death. Their inability wasn’t due to religion, but philosophy: saying someone is dead is nonsense, as the person no longer is. The one thing that can talk about something that is not, as D. Vance Smith shows in this innovative, provocative book, is literature. Covering the emergence of English literature from the Old English to the late medieval periods, Arts of Dying argues that the problem of how to designate death produced a long tradition of literature about dying, which continues in the work of Heidegger, Blanchot, and Gillian Rose. Philosophy’s attempt to designate death’s impossibility is part of a literature that imagines a relationship with death, a literature that intensively and self-reflexively supposes that its very terms might solve the problem of the termination of life. A lyrical and elegiac exploration that combines medieval work on the philosophy of language with contemporary theorizing on death and dying, Arts of Dying is an important contribution to medieval studies, literary criticism, phenomenology, and continental philosophy.
Oedipus and the Sphinx: The Threshold Myth from Sophocles through Freud to Cocteau
by Almut-Barbara RengerWhen Oedipus met the Sphinx on the road to Thebes, he did more than answer a riddle—he spawned a myth that, told and retold, would become one of Western culture’s central narratives about self-understanding. Identifying the story as a threshold myth—in which the hero crosses over into an unknown and dangerous realm where rules and limits are not known—Oedipus and the Sphinx offers a fresh account of this mythic encounter and how it deals with the concepts of liminality and otherness. Almut-Barbara Renger assesses the story’s meanings and functions in classical antiquity—from its presence in ancient vase painting to its absence in Sophocles’s tragedy—before arriving at two of its major reworkings in European modernity: the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and the poetics of Jean Cocteau. Through her readings, she highlights the ambiguous status of the Sphinx and reveals Oedipus himself to be a liminal creature, providing key insights into Sophocles’s portrayal and establishing a theoretical framework that organizes evaluations of the myth’s reception in the twentieth century. Revealing the narrative of Oedipus and the Sphinx to be the very paradigm of a key transition experienced by all of humankind, Renger situates myth between the competing claims of science and art in an engagement that has important implications for current debates in literary studies, psychoanalytic theory, cultural history, and aesthetics.
Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America
by Teresa BarnettA piece of Plymouth Rock. A lock of George Washington’s hair. Wood from the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. Various bits and pieces of the past—often called “association items”—may appear to be eccentric odds and ends, but they are valued because of their connections to prominent people and events in American history. Kept in museum collections large and small across the United States, such objects are the touchstones of our popular engagement with history. In Sacred Relics, Teresa Barnett explores the history of private collections of items like these, illuminating how Americans view the past. She traces the relic-collecting tradition back to eighteenth-century England, then on to articles belonging to the founding fathers and through the mass collecting of artifacts that followed the Civil War. Ultimately, Barnett shows how we can trace our own historical collecting from the nineteenth century’s assemblages of the material possessions of great men and women.
A Place That Matters Yet: John Gubbins's MuseumAfrica in the Postcolonial World
by Sara ByalaA Place That Matters Yet unearths the little-known story of Johannesburg’s MuseumAfrica, a South African history museum that embodies one of the most dynamic and fraught stories of colonialism and postcolonialism, its life spanning the eras before, during, and after apartheid. Sara Byala, in examining this story, sheds new light not only on racism and its institutionalization in South Africa but also on the problems facing any museum that is charged with navigating colonial history from a postcolonial perspective. Drawing on thirty years of personal letters and public writings by museum founder John Gubbins, Byala paints a picture of a uniquely progressive colonist, focusing on his philosophical notion of “three-dimensional thinking,” which aimed to transcend binaries and thus—quite explicitly—racism. Unfortunately, Gubbins died within weeks of the museum’s opening, and his hopes would go unrealized as the museum fell in line with emergent apartheid politics. Following the museum through this transformation and on to its 1994 reconfiguration as a post-apartheid institution, Byala showcases it as a rich—and problematic—archive of both material culture and the ideas that surround that culture, arguing for its continued importance in the establishment of a unified South Africa.
Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime: The Oceans' Oddest Creatures and Why They Matter
by Ellen PragerWhen viewed from a quiet beach, the ocean, with its rolling waves and vast expanse, can seem calm, even serene. But hidden beneath the sea’s waves are a staggering abundance and variety of active creatures, engaged in the never-ending struggles of life—to reproduce, to eat, and to avoid being eaten. With Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime, marine scientist Ellen Prager takes us deep into the sea to introduce an astonishing cast of fascinating and bizarre creatures that make the salty depths their home. From the tiny but voracious arrow worms whose rapacious ways may lead to death by overeating, to the lobsters that battle rivals or seduce mates with their urine, to the sea’s masters of disguise, the octopuses, Prager not only brings to life the ocean’s strange creatures, but also reveals the ways they interact as predators, prey, or potential mates. And while these animals make for some jaw-dropping stories—witness the sea cucumber, which ejects its own intestines to confuse predators, or the hagfish that ties itself into a knot to keep from suffocating in its own slime—there’s far more to Prager’s account than her ever-entertaining anecdotes: again and again, she illustrates the crucial connections between life in the ocean and humankind, in everything from our food supply to our economy, and in drug discovery, biomedical research, and popular culture. Written with a diver’s love of the ocean, a novelist’s skill at storytelling, and a scientist’s deep knowledge, Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime enchants as it educates, enthralling us with the wealth of life in the sea—and reminding us of the need to protect it.
The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
by Robert ZaretskyKnown as the “patron saint of all outsiders,” Simone Weil (1909–43) was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance. Though Weil published little during her life, after her death, thanks largely to the efforts of Albert Camus, hundreds of pages of her manuscripts were published to critical and popular acclaim. While many seekers have been attracted to Weil’s religious thought, Robert Zaretsky gives us a different Weil, exploring her insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side of Weil that balances her contradictions—the rigorous rationalist who also had her own brand of Catholic mysticism; the revolutionary with a soft spot for anarchism yet who believed in the hierarchy of labor; and the humanitarian who emphasized human needs and obligations over human rights. Reflecting on the relationship between thought and action in Weil’s life, The Subversive Simone Weil honors the complexity of Weil’s thought and speaks to why it matters and continues to fascinate readers today.
The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright (Chicago Architecture And Urbanism Ser.)
by Lisa D. SchrenkBetween 1898 and 1909, Frank Lloyd Wright’s residential studio in the idyllic Chicago suburb of Oak Park served as a nontraditional work setting as he matured into a leader in his field and formulized his iconic design ideology. Here, architectural historian Lisa D. Schrenk breaks the myth of Wright as the lone genius and reveals new insights into his early career. With a rich narrative voice and meticulous detail, Schrenk tracks the practice’s evolution: addressing how the studio fit into the Chicago-area design scene; identifying other architects working there and their contributions; and exploring how the suburban setting and the nearby presence of Wright’s family influenced office life. Built as an addition to his 1889 shingle-style home, Wright’s studio was a core site for the ideological development of the prairie house, one of the first truly American forms of residential architecture. Schrenk documents the educational atmosphere of Wright’s office in the context of his developing design ideology, revealing three phases as he transitioned from colleague to leader. This heavily illustrated book includes a detailed discussion of the physical changes Wright made to the building and how they informed his architectural thinking and educational practices. Schrenk also addresses the later transformations of the building, including into an art center in the 1930s, its restoration in the 1970s and 80s, and its current use as a historic house museum. Based on significant original and archival research, including interviews with Wright’s family and others involved in the studio and 180 images, The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright offers the first comprehensive look at the early independent office of one of the world’s most influential architects.
Leihmutterschaft interdisziplinär: Aktuelle Perspektiven
by Asadeh Ansari-BodeweinDer vorliegende Band enthält eine Sammlung von Aufsätzen zum Thema Leihmutterschaft aus Blickrichtungen verschiedener Disziplinen, die allesamt jeweils an den aktuellen Forschungsstand anknüpfen. Das Buch wendet sich an Interessierte aller Fächer, die sich mit der kontrovers diskutierten Frage nach einer Liberalisierung von Leihmutterschaftsmodellen befassen und gibt dabei einen Einblick in die Grundlagen der Diskussion in den relevanten Fächern Philosophie, Psychologie, Soziologie, Rechtswissenschaft und Medizin.
Digitalization in companies: From theoretical approaches to practical
by Thomas Barton Christian Müller Christian SeelThe book conveys current approaches to digitization in companies and shows how digitization projects can be successfully and safely implemented in practice. Based on the description of a changing value creation and working world, the changes associated with digitization are explained using application scenarios: New business models and business processes are being established, the development of products is changing as is the interaction with customers, new opportunities but also new risks are emerging. The authors of the article present the basics as well as concepts for the concrete planning and implementation of the digitization of processes and applications. Aspects of IT security are not neglected either. The editors' work is based on questions from entrepreneurial practice and is also suitable for students and teachers.
Photocatalysis for Energy and Environmental Applications: Current Trends and Future Perspectives (Green Energy and Technology)
by Panneerselvam SathishkumarThis book presents the existing photocatalytic reactor design and the future developments and the progress needed for both solar light-driven hydrogen generation and environmental purification. The chapters discuss the renewable and commercial aspects of translucent polymer-linked heterojunction nanocomposites as visible light-responsive photocatalysts. Relevant to these areas, the field of growing interest in black-TiO2, perovskites, MXenes and their numerous applications are presented. The framework, structural features and the need of mesocrystals for solar light-driven photocatalysis are also included. The book also discusses the additional features of green chemistry-based synthesis of nanomaterials in order to reduce any secondary pollution that may be released in the environment due to unsafe disposal of solvents. In addition, the importance of bismuth-based nanophotocatalysts towards energy and environmental applications and their future development as alternative photocatalysts for the prevailing nanomaterials are presented. The book also touches upon the idea to generate green fuel hydrogen through photocatalytic and photoelectrochemical techniques. Overall the book highlights contemporary developments in the last decade, the future perspectives of photocatalysis and its application towards energy and environment.
How the Financial Crisis and Great Recession Affected Higher Education (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report)
by Jeffrey R. Brown and Caroline M. HoxbyThe recent financial crisis had a profound effect on both public and private universities, which faced shrinking endowments, declining charitable contributions, and reductions in government support. Universities responded to these stresses in different ways. This volume presents new evidence on the nature of these responses, and on how the incentives and constraints facing different institutions affected their behavior. The studies in this volume explore how various practices at institutions of higher education, such as the drawdown of endowment resources, the awarding of financial aid, and spending on research, responded to the financial crisis. The studies examine universities as economic organizations that operate in a complex institutional and financial environment. The authors examine the role of endowments in university finances and the interaction of spending policies, asset allocation strategies, and investment opportunities. They demonstrate that universities’ behavior can be modeled using economic principles.
Once Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body
by Andrea NightingaleOnce Out of Nature offers an original interpretation of Augustine’s theory of time and embodiment. Andrea Nightingale draws on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, and social history to analyze Augustine’s conception of temporality, eternity, and the human and transhuman condition. In Nightingale’s view, the notion of embodiment illuminates a set of problems much larger than the body itself: it captures the human experience of being an embodied soul dwelling on earth. In Augustine’s writings, humans live both in and out of nature—exiled from Eden and punished by mortality, they are “resident aliens” on earth. While the human body is subject to earthly time, the human mind is governed by what Nightingale calls psychic time. For the human psyche always stretches away from the present moment—where the physical body persists—into memories and expectations. As Nightingale explains, while the body is present in the here and now, the psyche cannot experience self-presence. Thus, for Augustine, the human being dwells in two distinct time zones, in earthly time and in psychic time. The human self, then, is a moving target. Adam, Eve, and the resurrected saints, by contrast, live outside of time and nature: these transhumans dwell in an everlasting present. Nightingale connects Augustine’s views to contemporary debates about transhumans and suggests that Augustine’s thought reflects our own ambivalent relationship with our bodies and the earth. Once Out of Nature offers a compelling invitation to ponder the boundaries of the human.
Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics (Nber-long-term Factors In Economic Devel Ser.)
by Enid M. Fogel Mark Guglielmo Nathaniel Grotte Robert WilliamWe take for granted today that the assessments, measurements, and forecasts of economists are crucial to the decision-making of governments and businesses alike. But less than a century ago that wasn’t the case—economists simply didn’t have the necessary information or statistical tools to understand the ever more complicated modern economy. With Political Arithmetic, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets, the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the creation of the concept of GNP, which for the first time enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The book weaves together the many strands of political and economic thought and historical pressures that together created the demand for more detailed economic thinking—Progressive-era hopes for activist government, the production demands of World War I, Herbert Hoover’s interest in business cycles as President Harding’s commerce secretary, and the catastrophic economic failures of the Great Depression—and shows how, through trial and error, measurement and analysis, economists such as Kuznets rose to the occasion and in the process built a discipline whose knowledge could be put to practical use in everyday decision-making. The product of a lifetime of studying the workings of economies and skillfully employing the tools of economics, Political Arithmetic is simultaneously a history of a key period of economic thought and a testament to the power of applied ideas.
Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History
by Michael Allen GillespieIn this wide-ranging and thoughtful study, Michael Allen Gillespie explores the philosophical foundation, or ground, of the concept of history. Analyzing the historical conflict between human nature and freedom, he centers his discussion on Hegel and Heidegger but also draws on the pertinent thought of other philosophers whose contributions to the debate is crucial—particularly Rousseau, Kant, and Nietzsche.
The Shock of the Ancient: Literature & History in Early Modern France
by Larry F. NormanThe cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. The Shock of the Ancient turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrating how the defenders of Greek literature—rather than clinging to an outmoded tradition—celebrated the radically different practices of the ancient world. At a time when the constraints of decorum and the politics of French absolutism quashed the expression of cultural differences, the ancient world presented a disturbing face of otherness. Larry F. Norman explores how the authoritative status of ancient Greek texts allowed them to justify literary depictions of the scandalous. The Shock of the Ancient surveys the diverse array of aesthetic models presented in these ancient works and considers how they both helped to undermine the rigid codes of neoclassicism and paved the way for the innovative philosophies of the Enlightenment. Broadly appealing to students of European literature, art history, and philosophy, this book is an important contribution to early modern literary and cultural debates.
Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene (science.culture)
by David SepkoskiA history of scientific ideas about extinction that explains why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to “think catastrophically” about extinction. We live in an age in which we are repeatedly reminded—by scientists, by the media, by popular culture—of the looming threat of mass extinction. We’re told that human activity is currently producing a sixth mass extinction, perhaps of even greater magnitude than the five previous geological catastrophes that drastically altered life on Earth. Indeed, there is a very real concern that the human species may itself be poised to go the way of the dinosaurs, victims of the most recent mass extinction some 65 million years ago. How we interpret the causes and consequences of extinction and their ensuing moral imperatives is deeply embedded in the cultural values of any given historical moment. And, as David Sepkoski reveals, the history of scientific ideas about extinction over the past two hundred years—as both a past and a current process—is implicated in major changes in the way Western society has approached biological and cultural diversity. It seems self-evident to most of us that diverse ecosystems and societies are intrinsically valuable, but the current fascination with diversity is a relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, the way we value diversity depends crucially on our sense that it is precarious—that it is something actively threatened, and that its loss could have profound consequences. In Catastrophic Thinking, Sepkoski uncovers how and why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to think catastrophically about extinction.