Books on the topic 'First order indices'

The theory of inequality measurement can be founded on a few very simple principles concerning the comparison of income distributions. This chapter discusses the standard principles and the types of inequality indices that follow from them. It shows how these principles and indices can be related to conventional approaches to social-welfare analysis. Adjusting a few pieces within this same framework enables one to derive alternative, novel types of inequality indices and lays the basis for commonly-used types of poverty indices. The chapter also covers other general approaches to distributional comparisons including first-order and second-order dominance and their interpretation in terms of inequality and poverty.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, middle-class men and women formed non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and filed public interest litigation suits (PILs) in order to expand temple space, knock down buildings that block views of Kālīghāṭ’s façade, and remove undesirable materials and populations from its environs. Employing the language of cleanliness and order, they worked (and continue to work) to make Kālīghāṭ a “must-see” tourist attraction. Scholarship has shown that India’s new middle classes—those produced through India’s economic liberalization policies in the 1990s—desire highly visible forms demonstrating their modernity as well as their uniqueness on the international stage of urban space. The example of Kālīghāṭ indicates how India’s new middle classes build on the work of the old middle classes to deploy the temple as emblematic of both their modernity and their Indian-ness. In so doing, they read the idioms of public space onto sacred space.

This article discusses the connection between the matrix models and algebraic geometry. In particular, it considers three specific applications of matrix models to algebraic geometry, namely: the Kontsevich matrix model that describes intersection indices on moduli spaces of curves with marked points; the Hermitian matrix model free energy at the leading expansion order as the prepotential of the Seiberg-Witten-Whitham-Krichever hierarchy; and the other orders of free energy and resolvent expansions as symplectic invariants and possibly amplitudes of open/closed strings. The article first describes the moduli space of algebraic curves and its parameterization via the Jenkins-Strebel differentials before analysing the relation between the so-called formal matrix models (solutions of the loop equation) and algebraic hierarchies of Dijkgraaf-Witten-Whitham-Krichever type. It also presents the WDVV (Witten-Dijkgraaf-Verlinde-Verlinde) equations, along with higher expansion terms and symplectic invariants.

This chapter shows how the fragmentation of political authority precipitated a crisis of legitimacy of the old order. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative data, it first shows how Indira Gandhi attempted to restore central control through intervention in India’s states. Failing to reestablish control over India’s fragmented patronage network, she then made a populist turn, mobilizing the masses across India through the media and mass rallies in her conflict with her opponents. This chapter argues that this strategy was a consequence of the breakdown of the Congress system, rather than its cause. Mrs Gandhi’s attempt to recentralize power met with substantial resistance in the states. Her government eroded the rule of law and the undermined the formal institutions of intermediation between state and society. The authoritarian emergency that followed from 1975 to 1977 was not an aberration of this populist program, but its logical fulfillment.

This survey of economic history emphasizes American Indians’ varied and varying responses to profit-oriented economic practices introduced by non-Indians. It depicts aboriginal Indian economies as diverse and dynamic though modeled on kin relations and reciprocity. European colonial settlements and Euro-Americans’ ultimate hegemony, fueled by commercial market relations and capitalist development, eventually undermined every indigenous population’s self-sufficiency. Most Indians consequently fell into poverty, but not for lack of strategic and sometimes rewarding engagement with the new market economy. Indians’ many adaptive strategies have included participation in commercial trade, wage labor, and manufacturing, often in order to supplement traditional subsistence practices and further Indian ideals. The chapter stresses that United States policies and law first facilitated the massive transfer of Indian land and resources to non-Indians, but that more recent policy changes and court rulings have enabled some Indians to recoup wealth by operating tribe-owned enterprises.

Semantics is the discipline that studies linguistic meaning generally, and the qualification ‘formal’ indicates something about the sorts of techniques used in investigating linguistic meaning. More specifically, formal semantics is the discipline that employs techniques from symbolic logic, mathematics, and mathematical logic to produce precisely characterized theories of meaning for natural languages (i.e. naturally occurring languages such as English, Urdu, etc.) or artificial languages (i.e. first-order predicate logic, computer programming languages etc.). Formal semantics as we know it first arose in the twentieth century. It was made possible by certain developments in logic during that period. This article chronicles those developments and how they led to the development of formal semantics.

In this brief chapter Ruchi Ram Sahni describes his first job after Government College, Lahore, as Assistant Meteorological Reporter to the Government of India, based first in Calcutta where he was trained, and then in Simla. In Calcutta he attended lectures in Chemistry at the Presidency College in order to work towards an MA degree, and made the acquaintance of men such as Ashutosh Mookerjee, who were later to become prominent figures in Bengal. The chapter follows him to Simla, where he worked under the supervision of Mr H.E. Blanford. Sahni records a great regard for the Englishman’s kindness, contrasting it with the general hierarchical attitude of other Englishmen towards Indians. It is these attitudes that create the ‘trials and struggles’ for Indian officials such as Sahni.

This concluding chapter traces the history of classic noir by reflecting on the way in which the genre has been discursively constituted through its beginnings and endings, an act of periodization that typically entails nominating particular films as the first and last noir in order to differentiate the intervening films from, respectively, proto- and neo-noir. While the recent interest in Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) is one sign that Boris Ingster's film has supplanted The Maltese Falcon (1941) as the first, titular American noir, recent transnational readings of the genre have problematized the reflexive determination of classic noir as a strictly American phenomenon. In fact, the impact of Odds against Tomorrow (1959) on transnational neo-noir indicates that the end or terminus of the classical era is just as provisional—just as open to interpretation and therefore, revision—as its origin.

This chapter examines the history of museums as it relates to American Indians in the United States, from the eighteenth century to the present. The chapter takes into account the often troubling use of the museum to depict indigenous societies as exotic relics of the past, while at the same time alienating artifacts of their material culture from them. In order to better understand the rise of museums and cultural centers created and run by Native peoples in recent decades, it is first necessary to understand both the histories and the practices of non-Indian run museums that demanded this necessary corrective from within indigenous communities. The chapter concludes with three examples of contemporary indigenous culture centers.

The Arthur Crawford Scandal explores how nineteenth century Bombay tried a British official for corruption. The presidency government persuaded Indians, government officials, to testify against the very person who controlled their career by offering immunity from legal action and career punishment. A criminal conviction of Crawford’s henchman established the modus operandi of a bribery network. Subsequent efforts to intimidate Indian witnesses led to litigation at the high court level, resulting in a political pressure campaign in London based on biased press reports from India. These reports evoked questions in the House of Commons; questions became demands that Indians witnesses against Crawford be fired from government service. The secretary of state for India and the Bombay government negotiated about the fate of the Indian witnesses. At first, the secretary of state accepted the Bombay government’s proposals. But the press campaign against the Indian witnesses eventually led him to order the Government of India, in consultation with the Government of Bombay, to pass a law ordering those officials who paid Crawford willingly, to be fired. Those whom the Bombay government determined to be extorted were not to be fired. Both groups retained immunity from further actions at law. Thus, Bombay won a victory that almost saved its original guarantee of immunity: those who were fired were to receive their salary (along with periodic step increases) until they reached retirement age, at which time they would receive a pension. However, this ‘solution’ did little to overcome the stigma and suffering of the fired officials.

This is a study of the union of matter and the soul in human beings in the thought of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas. At first glance, this issue might appear arcane, but it was at the centre of Catholic polemic with heresy in the thirteenth century and of the development of medieval thought. The book argues that theological issues, especially the need for an identical body to be resurrected at the end of time, were vital to Aquinas’s account of how human beings are constituted. The book explores how theological questions shaped Aquinas’s thought on individuality and bodily identity over time, his embryology and understanding of heredity, his work on nutrition and bodily growth, and his fundamental conception of matter. It demonstrates how Aquinas used his peripatetic sources, Aristotle and Averroes, to further his own thinking. The book indicates how Aquinas’s thought on bodily identity became pivotal to university debates and relations between rival mendicant orders in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and that quarrels surrounding these issues persisted into the fifteenth century. Not only is this a study of the interface between theology, biology, and physics in Aquinas’s thought; it also fundamentally revises the generally accepted view of Aquinas. Aquinas is famous for holding that the only substantial form in a human being is the soul; most scholars have therefore thought he located the identity of the individual in their soul. This book restores the body through a thorough examination of the range of Aquinas’s works.

Hard coal mining is characterised by features that pose numerous challenges to its current operations and cause strategic and operational problems in planning its development. The most important of these include the high capital intensity of mining investment projects and the dynamically changing environment in which the sector operates, while the long-term role of the sector is dependent on factors originating at both national and international level. At the same time, the conditions for coal mining are deteriorating, the resources more readily available in active mines are being exhausted, mining depths are increasing, temperature levels in pits are rising, transport routes for staff and materials are getting longer, effective working time is decreasing, natural hazards are increasing, and seams with an increasing content of waste rock are being mined. The mining industry is currently in a very difficult situation, both in technical (mining) and economic terms. It cannot be ignored, however, that the difficult financial situation of Polish mining companies is largely exacerbated by their high operating costs. The cost of obtaining coal and its price are two key elements that determine the level of efficiency of Polish mines. This situation could be improved by streamlining the planning processes. This would involve striving for production planning that is as predictable as possible and, on the other hand, economically efficient. In this respect, it is helpful to plan the production from operating longwalls with full awareness of the complexity of geological and mining conditions and the resulting economic consequences. The constraints on increasing the efficiency of the mining process are due to the technical potential of the mining process, organisational factors and, above all, geological and mining conditions. The main objective of the monograph is to identify relations between geological and mining parameters and the level of longwall mining costs, and their daily output. In view of the above, it was assumed that it was possible to present the relationship between the costs of longwall mining and the daily coal output from a longwall as a function of onerous geological and mining factors. The monograph presents two models of onerous geological and mining conditions, including natural hazards, deposit (seam) parameters, mining (technical) parameters and environmental factors. The models were used to calculate two onerousness indicators, Wue and WUt, which synthetically define the level of impact of onerous geological and mining conditions on the mining process in relation to: —— operating costs at longwall faces – indicator WUe, —— daily longwall mining output – indicator WUt. In the next research step, the analysis of direct relationships of selected geological and mining factors with longwall costs and the mining output level was conducted. For this purpose, two statistical models were built for the following dependent variables: unit operating cost (Model 1) and daily longwall mining output (Model 2). The models served two additional sub-objectives: interpretation of the influence of independent variables on dependent variables and point forecasting. The models were also used for forecasting purposes. Statistical models were built on the basis of historical production results of selected seven Polish mines. On the basis of variability of geological and mining conditions at 120 longwalls, the influence of individual parameters on longwall mining between 2010 and 2019 was determined. The identified relationships made it possible to formulate numerical forecast of unit production cost and daily longwall mining output in relation to the level of expected onerousness. The projection period was assumed to be 2020–2030. On this basis, an opinion was formulated on the forecast of the expected unit production costs and the output of the 259 longwalls planned to be mined at these mines. A procedure scheme was developed using the following methods: 1) Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) – mathematical multi-criteria decision-making method, 2) comparative multivariate analysis, 3) regression analysis, 4) Monte Carlo simulation. The utilitarian purpose of the monograph is to provide the research community with the concept of building models that can be used to solve real decision-making problems during longwall planning in hard coal mines. The layout of the monograph, consisting of an introduction, eight main sections and a conclusion, follows the objectives set out above. Section One presents the methodology used to assess the impact of onerous geological and mining conditions on the mining process. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is reviewed and basic definitions used in the following part of the paper are introduced. The section includes a description of AHP which was used in the presented analysis. Individual factors resulting from natural hazards, from the geological structure of the deposit (seam), from limitations caused by technical requirements, from the impact of mining on the environment, which affect the mining process, are described exhaustively in Section Two. Sections Three and Four present the construction of two hierarchical models of geological and mining conditions onerousness: the first in the context of extraction costs and the second in relation to daily longwall mining. The procedure for valuing the importance of their components by a group of experts (pairwise comparison of criteria and sub-criteria on the basis of Saaty’s 9-point comparison scale) is presented. The AHP method is very sensitive to even small changes in the value of the comparison matrix. In order to determine the stability of the valuation of both onerousness models, a sensitivity analysis was carried out, which is described in detail in Section Five. Section Six is devoted to the issue of constructing aggregate indices, WUe and WUt, which synthetically measure the impact of onerous geological and mining conditions on the mining process in individual longwalls and allow for a linear ordering of longwalls according to increasing levels of onerousness. Section Seven opens the research part of the work, which analyses the results of the developed models and indicators in individual mines. A detailed analysis is presented of the assessment of the impact of onerous mining conditions on mining costs in selected seams of the analysed mines, and in the case of the impact of onerous mining on daily longwall mining output, the variability of this process in individual fields (lots) of the mines is characterised. Section Eight presents the regression equations for the dependence of the costs and level of extraction on the aggregated onerousness indicators, WUe and WUt. The regression models f(KJC_N) and f(W) developed in this way are used to forecast the unit mining costs and daily output of the designed longwalls in the context of diversified geological and mining conditions. The use of regression models is of great practical importance. It makes it possible to approximate unit costs and daily output for newly designed longwall workings. The use of this knowledge may significantly improve the quality of planning processes and the effectiveness of the mining process.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.