An investigation of US participation in the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas, from the American Revolution to the Civil War While much of modern scholarship has focused on the American slave trade’s impact within the United States, considerably less has addressed its effects in other parts of the Americas. A rich analysis of a complex subject, this study draws on Portuguese, Brazilian, and Spanish primary documents—as well as English-language material—to shed new light on the changing behavior of slave traders and their networks, particularly in Brazil and Cuba. Slavery in these nations, as Marques shows, contributed to the mounting tensions that would ultimately lead to the U.S. Civil War. Taking a truly Atlantic perspective, Marques outlines the multiple forms of U.S. involvement in this traffic amid various legislation and shifting international relations, exploring the global processes that shaped the history of this participation.
How does the state separate music from noise? How can such filtering apparatus shape the content and form of sound production in the city? As a marker of co-presence to the hearing body, sound is always open to (or rather opens up) the politics of shared existence. In the throes of the post-dictatorship period, Brazil's legislative and executive branches implemented a series of sweeping measures to address quality of life concerns, including environmental pollution and urban inequality. In São Paulo, noise control became a recurrent controversy, growing in size and scale between the 1990s and 2010s. Together with the much-debated fear of crime and the socioeconomic and cultural tensions between the rich urban center and the poor peripheries, such ecological agendas against noise as a harmful pollutant have reconfigured the presence of environmental sounds in the city. In this book, Cardoso argues that the framing of specific sounds as unavoidable, unnecessary, or as harmful "noise" has been an effective strategy to organize spaces and administer group behavior in this rapidly expanding city. He focuses on two interrelated processes. First, the series of institutional regulatory mechanisms that turn sounds into the all-embracing "noise" susceptible to state intervention. Second, the constant attempts of interested groups in either attaching or detaching specific sounds (musical events, industrial noise, traffic noise, religious sounds, etc.) from regulatory scrutiny. Sound-politics is the dynamics that emerges from both processes - the channels through which sounds enter (and leave) the sphere of state regulation.
The history of Latin American journalism is ultimately the story of a people who have been silenced over the centuries, primarily Native Americans, women, peasants, and the urban poor. This book seeks to correct the record propounded by most English-language surveys of Latin American journalism, which tend to neglect pre-Columbian forms of reporting, the ways in which technology has been used as a tool of colonization, and the Latin American conceptual foundations of a free press. Challenging the conventional notion of a free marketplace of ideas in a region plagued with serious problems of poverty, violence, propaganda, political intolerance, poor ethics, journalism education deficiencies, and media concentration in the hands of an elite, Ferreira debunks the myth of a free press in Latin America. The diffusion of colonial presses in the New World resulted in the imposition of a structural censorship with elements that remain to this day. They include ethnic and gender discrimination, technological elitism, state and religious authoritarianism, and ideological controls. Impoverished, afraid of crime and violence, and without access to an effective democracy, ordinary Latin Americans still live silenced by ruling actors that include a dominant and concentrated media. Thus, not only is the press not free in Latin America, but it is also itself an instrument of oppression.
This book presents an early modern Jesuit attitude towards Hindu and Ethiopian strains of asceticism. The Jesuits’ descriptions of both the yogis and the Ethiopian renunciates were marked by ambivalence. While critical of these ascetics, the missionaries also pointed out admirable facets of their comportment. In both the Society of Jesus’ positive and negative impressions, there are glaring ethnocentric views that shift the spotlight onto the other’s flaws. Like many historical cases, these perceptions evolved into a sort of inverted mirror image of the self that revealed differences between the European Catholic and the native renunciate.
In the nineteenth century a new type of mystic emerged in Catholic Europe. While cases of stigmatisation had been reported since the thirteenth century, this era witnessed the development of the ‘stigmatic’: young women who attracted widespread interest thanks to the appearance of physical stigmata. To understand the popularity of these stigmatics we need to regard them as the ‘saints’ and religious ‘celebrities’ of their time. With their ‘miraculous’ bodies, they fit contemporary popular ideas (if not necessarily those of the Church) of what sanctity was. As knowledge about them spread via modern media and their fame became marketable, they developed into religious ‘celebrities’.
The amount and the complexity of the data gathered by current enterprises are increasing at an exponential rate. Consequently, the analysis of Big Data is nowadays a central challenge in Computer Science, especially for complex data. For example, given a satellite image database containing tens of Terabytes, how can we find regions aiming at identifying native rainforests, deforestation or reforestation? Can it be made automatically? Based on the work discussed in this book, the answers to both questions are a sound “yes”, and the results can be obtained in just minutes. In fact, results that used to require days or weeks of hard work from human specialists can now be obtained in minutes with high precision. Data Mining in Large Sets of Complex Data discusses new algorithms that take steps forward from traditional data mining (especially for clustering) by considering large, complex datasets. Usually, other works focus in one aspect, either data size or complexity. This work considers both: it enables mining complex data from high impact applications, such as breast cancer diagnosis, region classification in satellite images, assistance to climate change forecast, recommendation systems for the Web and social networks; the data are large in the Terabyte-scale, not in Giga as usual; and very accurate results are found in just minutes. Thus, it provides a crucial and well timed contribution for allowing the creation of real time applications that deal with Big Data of high complexity in which mining on the fly can make an immeasurable difference, such as supporting cancer diagnosis or detecting deforestation.
In Globalizing in Hard Times, Leonardo Martinez-Diaz examines the sudden and substantial increase in cross-border ownership of commercial banks in countries where bank ownership had long been restricted by local rules. Many parties—the World Bank and the IMF, the world's largest commercial banks, their home governments, and their negotiators—had been pushing for a relaxation of ownership rules since the early 1980s and into the 1990s, when bank profitability levels in advanced industrial societies went flat. In their hunt for higher returns on assets, the major banks looked to expand business overseas, but through the mid-1990s their efforts to impose more liberal ownership regimes in nationalist countries proved largely unsuccessful.Martinez-Diaz illustrates the ongoing political resistance to liberalized ownership rules in Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, and South Korea. He then demonstrates the importance of a series of events—the Mexican crisis and the Brazilian banking shock in 1994–1995 and the Asian crisis of 1997–1998 among them—in finally knocking down barriers to foreign ownership of banks. After these upheavals, policymakers who were worried about their political survival—and who were sometimes pressed by the IMF and foreign governments—reshaped the regulatory environment in key emerging markets. Self-proclaimed global banks eagerly grasped the opportunity to expand their operations worldwide, but after the initial shock, domestic politics reasserted themselves, often diluting the new, liberal rules.
We quantify gains from introducing non-defaultable debt as a limited additional financing option into a model of equilibrium sovereign risk. We find that, for an initial (defaultable) sovereign debt level equal to 66 percent of trend aggregate income and a sovereign spread of 2.9 percent, introducing the possibility of issuing non-defaultable debt for up to 10 percent of aggregate income reduces immediately the spread to 1.4 percent, and implies a welfare gain equivalent to a permanent consumption increase of 0.9 percent. The spread reduction would be only 0.1 (0.2) percentage points higher if the government uses nondefaultable debt to buy back (finance a “voluntary” debt exchange for) previously issued defaultable debt. Without restrictions to defaultable debt issuances in the future, the spread reduction achieved by the introduction of non-defaultable debt is short lived. We also show that allowing governments in default to increase non-defaultable debt is damaging at the time non-defaultable debt is introduced and inconsequential in the medium term. These findings shed light on different aspects of proposals to introduce common euro-area sovereign bonds that could be virtually non-defaultable.
This book presents a geostatistical framework for data integration into subsurface Earth modeling. It offers extensive geostatistical background information, including detailed descriptions of the main geostatistical tools traditionally used in Earth related sciences to infer the spatial distribution of a given property of interest. This framework is then directly linked with applications in the oil and gas industry and how it can be used as the basis to simultaneously integrate geophysical data (e.g. seismic reflection data) and well-log data into reservoir modeling and characterization. All of the cutting-edge methodologies presented here are first approached from a theoretical point of view and then supplemented by sample applications from real case studies involving different geological scenarios and different challenges. The book offers a valuable resource for students who are interested in learning more about the fascinating world of geostatistics and reservoir modeling and characterization. It offers them a deeper understanding of the main geostatistical concepts and how geostatistics can be used to achieve better data integration and reservoir modeling.
Economic analysis is also the key to measuring the efficacy of current anti-corruption instruments, and in the light of this the book finds many existing legal counter-measures lacking. On the other hand, its assessment of new international instruments
Many people claim that they have forgiven someone something that brought them some kind of pain, but often in their hearts, forgiveness did not happen. This book is intended to show you whether forgiveness, in its fullness, has actually been achieved and to demonstrate practical principles for truly forgiven. Part 1 refers to what is not forgiveness, answering the question: Have I really forgiven? The answers will be like filter. In each chapter, you will receive information that will lead you to a clarify of your reality in the face of forgiveness. Part 2 is about forgiveness and presents principles for forgiving someone. Many people even acknowledge their lack of forgiveness, but they do not know how to act, have difficulty moving, and do not move toward forgiveness, an essencial act in this situation. In this part, we still try to answer: Will I really forgive? The book will still show you: > Specific Bible verses related to forgiveness. > Keys and precious teachings on the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant. > Practical and objective questions that may help you understand your reality about forgiveness and lead you to true forgiveness. > Outstanding phrases for meditation on forgiveness. If you want to meet the challenge of forgiving someone in the heart, this book is for you. Read, meditate, and apply the proposals presented in each chapter. I am sure that, at the end of this journey, an inner change will occur and your life will be totally transformed.
We propose a modification to a baseline sovereign default framework that allows us to quantify the importance of debt dilution in accounting for the level and volatility of the interest rate spread paid by sovereigns. We measure the effects of debt dilution by comparing the simulations of the baseline model (with debt dilution) with the ones of the modified model without dilution. We calibrate the baseline model to mimic the mean and standard deviation of the spread, as well as the external debt level, the mean debt duration and a measure of default frequency in the data. We find that, even without commitment to future repayment policies and withoutcontingency of sovereign debt, if the sovereign could eliminate debt dilution, the number of default per 100 years decreases from 3.10 to 0.42. The mean spread decreases from 7.38% to 0.57%. The standard deviation of the spread decreases from 2.45 to 0.72. Default risk falls in part because of a reduction of the level of sovereign debt (36% of the face value and of 11% of the market value). But we show that the most important effect of dilution on default risk results from a shift in the set of government's borrowing opportunities. Our analysis is also relevant for the study of other credit markets where the debt dilution problem could be present.
This paper finds optimal fiscal rule parameter values and measures the effects of imposing fiscal rules using a default model calibrated to an economy that in the absence of a fiscal rule pays a significant sovereign default premium. The paper also studies the case in which the government conducts a voluntary debt restructuring to capture the capital gains from the increase in its debt market value implied by a rule announcement. In addition, the paper shows how debt ceilings may reduce the procyclicality of fiscal policy and thus consumption volatility.
The book begins with Prophecies, followed by the Fables on animals, on lifeless objects, on plants, and the Studies on the Life and Habits of Animals, in which Leonardo presents a curious sequence of animals and their description. It ends with the Jests and Tales and the Final Prophecies. Among these delightful and amusing writings, we find satires, fables, aphorisms, anecdotes, prophetic sayings, and enigmatic statements, ingeniously created or reproduced by the unique mind of Leonardo da Vinci.
This handsome book offers a unified and fascinating portrait of Leonardo as draftsman, integrating his roles as artist, scientist, inventor, theorist, and teacher. 250 illustrations.
Bridge Engineering: A Global Perspective is a comprehensive review of how we create and maintain bridges - one of the most vital yet vulnerable parts of our infrastructure - and how we got where we are today.Its 800 illustrated pages in full colourprovide a unique and authoritative reference for practitioners, researchers and students alike on the state-of-the-art of bridge engineering world-wide, from local community footbridges to vast multi-modal crossings between nations.
This book is focused on the concept and functions of corporate charitable donations. Charitable giving practices have always been a feature of society and will continue to be so in the future. In any case, the current and more widespread understanding of what corporate charitable donations are and of what their functions are, i.e. as mostly altruistic and non-commercial actions, is obsolete. There is still a prevailing misconception regarding the absence of economic benefits for corporations that grant charitable donations. This misconception leads to a misunderstanding of what motivates corporations to donate. This greatly impacts the way tax systems are designed and drafted. In addition, it generates suspicion regarding corporate charitable actions. This book provides a unique insight into the essential features of corporate charitable donations and their respective functions. It suggests a paradigm shift from an altruism-based approach to a functional approach that allows viewing donations as intrinsically bilateral relations, with benefits arising for both donor and donee. Building on this analysis, and with due consideration for constitutional and international law constraints, the book analyses how to improve the tax technical treatment of corporate charitable donations and perfect tax policy choices behind the tax system. It also provides a research breakthrough in legal and policy analysis, allowing for a move beyond the status quo, which is still mainly grounded in the understanding that any measures associated with donations are exceptional, qualifying as incentives or benefits that do not really form part of the structural features of a sound tax regime. --
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