Since the RootsTech website doesn't have the skinny, you're lucky you read the Ancestry Insider. Five open discussions or panel discussions are included in the RootsTech schedule. These ought to add some pizazz to your conference experience. Audience participation is a must.
How is cemetery data common with genealogical source data?
How should volunteers transcribe tomb stones?
How can cemetery data be associated with Family Trees?
What role should geo-coding play in cemetery surveys?
Can smart phones be used to digitize and transcribe tomb stones?
What is the value of Application Program Interfaces?
Do you have a preferences regarding SOAP, REST, or other protocols?
What do you think about XML, JSON, or AMF?
What structure do you like for API documentation?
Whats the difference between proprietary and open APIs?
Can the industry benefit from common APIs?
What is the definition of and the difference between a source and a citation?
What are the pros and cons of source templates and wizards?
How should the "Genealogical Proof Standard" be used?
What is the value of linking to an online representation of a source?
How important is indexing (transcribing) sources?
Should source images be made available without indexes?
What are the commonalities between the identity of an internet person and a genealogical person?
How should we profile a contributor?
Can or should Open Connect be used for the genealogical industry?
How can you communicate with a person without knowing their identity?
What is different about profiling and protecting the identity of a living person and a deceased person?
What rights or controls should a person and the descendants have regarding the person's history ?
Do we have person focus OR records focus OR both?
What's the difference between a data model and a file format?
Why do we need standardize file formats?
What are the concerns about models for persons? Family relationships? Events? Sources?
What are the pros and cons of getting support by major software/website vendors?
I think a casual glance at the moderators will disclose the source of my inside information. These should be fun. I hope to see you there!
I'm getting pretty excited! RootsTech is only two weeks away! If you've been putting off deciding about the conference, now's a good time to decide to come.
I mentioned before that one challenge I saw for conference organizers was the combination of classes for the general public and for technology creators (academics, software developers, and product managers). The conference schedule doesn't appear to indicate which classes are for which audience.
Well I've just noticed there is a "course schedule listing option" for listing only the classes for "Tech Users" (the general public) or for "Tech Creators." I don't know if the option has always been present. Since links to the schedule scroll this important feature off the top of the page, I suspect it was added after the fact.
As you work with the listing options, there are some other problems you should be aware of (unless FamilySearch fixes them before you read this).
If you set the listing option to "Keynotes/Luncheons," you won't see all the luncheons. Check out the Luncheon page to see them all.
The RootsTech website needs a page about the panel discussions, an indication of the intended audience (users or technology creators), a blurb about the subject, and a list of the panel members. The presenter column in the schedule should say "Discussion Panel" and include a link to the discussions page.
David Rencher would like a viewing lens that would read handwritten documents, like the "magic lens" shown to the right from www.DoHistory.org. Drag the magic lens over a handwritten document and magically the text is shown clearly.
Well, David, let me give you a status report on this technology.
Some limited applications are already available. A2iA can do envelopes and checks. It can classify document types, and it can read form fields.
Do you know of other work being done to read old handwriting automatically? Share your discoveries here by leaving a comment.
With the release of the new FamilySearch.org website, many are asking where the International Genealogical Index (IGI) went. To understand where it went, you first need to understand what it is and where it came from. This week I've addressed the what, when, whence, why, and how of the IGI.
Extracted records. These are useful to genealogists as indexes to evidentiary information.
Member submissions. These are useful to genealogists when treated as conclusions that must be verified.
While the IGI was useful for these purposes, as we've also seen, it wasn't designed for them and didn't serve either one perfectly well.
Because it was not designed as a genealogist's tool, the IGI did not use a conclusion tree to store and present genealogical conclusions.
If designed for genealogists, extracted records would not be thrown away if a conclusion about the person existed.
Because it was not designed as a tool for genealogists, locations were indexed only to the U.S. state or U.K. county. Genealogists really needed to search at the city or parish level.
Ugly as it is, I'm glad someone came up with the batch number workaround to allow city and parish searches. Instead of entering city, state, and country (or parish, county, and country) into the computer, you enter IGI Region and Batch Number. But first you had to figure out what batch number matched your desired location and time frame. For example, yesterday I wanted to search in Shustoke, Warwick, England. I looked up the batch numbers for Shustoke and found C022862 covered the desired time frame. I then went back to the IGI, entered the region and batch number and performed the search.
There are several ways to figure out a location's batch number(s).
You can search for websites that list batch numbers for your location. All proficient English researchers know about Hugh Wallis's website.
If you know enough about one person in the desired location to search and find him without a batch number, you can comb through the results hoping one is an extracted record.
If you have access to the IGI on fiche, you can look up the location on the PVRL fiche. Back when the PVRL was current, you would even learn if extraction records existed for your location.
If a Parish Printout was created for the batch, a Family History Library Catalog search will yield the batch number.
Once again, the ugly batch number provided a workaround. Check an entry's batch number and use the first letter to distinguish an extracted entry from a member submission.
If designed for genealogists, the source citations included in member submissions would have been keyed into the computer with the rest of the submission. Without the source citations the information is far less valuable.
The batch number is again the ugly workaround. Use the batch number to determine if a copy of the member submission is available on microfilm. If it is, pay $5.50 to have a copy sent to your family history center and hope the submitter specified a source. Wait for the film to arrive. Examine the member submission to see if the member gave a source and what the source was. Repeat for each applicable member submission.
With the release of the new FamilySearch.org website, many are asking where the International Genealogical Index (IGI) went. To understand where it went, you first need to understand what it is and where it came from. This whole week I have been addressed the what, when, whence, why, and where of the IGI.
As I mentioned previously, I think the original, idealized objective of the IGI was the creation of one individual entry for each person who had ever lived and one marriage entry for each couple that had ever wed. Consequently, it is an index of individuals and couples rather than an index to original records.
Over time the value of the file to the general public was recognized and in 1981 it was renamed the International Genealogical Index.2 However, the purpose of the IGI did not change. And the Church continued trying to avoid adding duplicates. As you will see momentarily, this compromised its value to the general public.
BULL CHR 19 DEC 1581 ANNE F WM.
BULL CHR 8 JAN 1583 ELIZABETH F WM.
Tomorrow: "Where is the IGI?" Actually, I'm behind schedule. You may not see the article until next week.
1. Elizabeth L. Nichols, "The International Genealogical Index (IGI), 1993 Edition : Part I," Federation of Genealogical Societies Forum, Spring 1994, 5-10.
2. James B. Allen, et. al., Hearts Turned to the Father, a special issue of BYU Studies 34:2 (1994-95), pp. 306, 317-9; digital images online (http://byustudies.byu.edu : accessed 28 December 2010).
3. Elizabeth L. Nichols, "The International Genealogical Index 1992 Edition : Part 2: More about Temple Records," Genealogists' Magazine 24 (December 1993): 352.
4. Elizabeth L. Nichols, "International Genealogical Index (IGI), 1993 Edition—Part IV," Federation of Genealogical Societies Forum, Fall 1994, 6.
5. You were probably hoping for a citation to the parish printout here. So was I. But I ran out of time. No matter. How I found it is fodder for a future article. Don't let me forget.
With the release of the new FamilySearch.org website, many are asking where the International Genealogical Index (IGI) went. To understand where it went, you first need to understand what it is and where it came from. This whole week I address the what, when, whence, why, and where of the IGI.
Characteristics of member submissions differ according to when the submission occurred. And the quality of submissions varies considerably.
1. Resource Guide: Finding an IGI Source, 4 p. booklet (Salt Lake City : Family History Library, 1995), 1; digital images, FamilySearch Help Center (http://www.familysearch.org : accessed 23 December 2010).
2. Elizabeth L. Nichols, "International Genealogical Index (IGI), 1993 Edition—Part II," Federation of Genealogical Societies Forum, Spring 1994, 4.
3. Elizabeth L. Nichols, "The International Genealogical Index 1992 Edition : Part 1: The Main Changes," Genealogists' Magazine 24 (September 1993): 294-7.
4. George H. Fudge and Frank Smith, LDS Genealogist's Handbook : Modern Procedures and Systems (Salt Lake City : Bookcraft, 1972), 33-48.


text:
»A Just Outcome is Possible.«
Law as a zone of contact and conflict
Lauren A. Benton, Monika Dommann, Kijan Malte Espahangizi
An Interview about Legal Pluralism, Jurisdictional Conflicts and Imperial Law in Historical Perspective
Lauren A. Benton is one of the most innovative contemporary researchers working in the field of legal history. Since July 2015, she is professor of history and law and the dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Previously, she held a position at NYU in the department of history. She has drawn the material for her studies, to large extent, from the Early Modern, Atlantic world: mainly from the writings of colonial legal scholars, in particular their studies of the legal status of the open sea, the slave trade, and the mountains of paper produced during the colonial period documenting the paradoxical situation of subaltern governors. Consequently, her understanding of law as a zone of contact and conflict is enlightening for those undertaking a post-colonial analysis of the globalized world. We met with Lauren Benton for an extensive interview on occasion of the public talk she held in December 2014 at the Center »History of Knowledge« (ETH & University of Zurich).
Interviewers: Monika Dommann, Kijan Espahangizi
Lauren A. Benton is one of the most innovative contemporary researchers working in the field of legal history. Since July 2015, she is professor of history and law and the dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Previously, she held a position at NYU in the department of history. She has drawn the material for her studies, to large extent, from the Early Modern, Atlantic world: mainly from the writings of colonial legal scholars, in particular their studies of the legal status of the open sea, the slave trade, and the mountains of paper produced during the colonial period documenting the paradoxical situation of subaltern governors. Consequently, her understanding of law as a zone of contact and conflict is enlightening for those undertaking a post-colonial analysis of the globalized world. We met with Lauren Benton for an extensive interview on occasion of a public talk she held in December 2014 at the Center »History of Knowledge« (ETH and University of Zurich).
Dommann: Can you tell us a few things about your intellectual biography? What did you study? And what led you to your current interests?
Benton: That's a long story because it involves a radical shift in what I was doing at first. I did my PhD in anthropology and history but worked mostly with sociologists on the study of migration. I wrote my dissertation on the informal sector, in particular on people working off the books in Spain, and this was post Franco Spain in the 1980's, so it was not a terribly historical project although there was some history in it, of course. It was a good project to do, I enjoyed it, and I got interested in law while I was doing it because one of the things I found was that people who work in the underground economy were using a lot of the regulatory frameworks of the formal economy, and so I began to get interested in legal pluralism through that route.
But when I finished the dissertation and then the book, I realized that my heart was with history and that the big questions I wanted to consider were historical questions. So the reason why it was such a radical shift was that this in fact required leaving a very good university post, a faculty position at MIT. At that point that was a pretty unusual thing to do and I think it was unclear whether I would find another university post. So in order to stop doing what I didn't want to do any longer and do something new, I had to just leap, so I leapt, and then I ended up getting another position and being able to work on this book about legal pluralism, Law and Colonial Cultures.
I mention all of this because it explains why for me that book really was my opportunity to write what I most wanted to write. I didn't have any sponsors I needed to make happy, I was just working on what I wanted to work on. So that was my first book about comparative law and legal history, and from there I continued to do what I am doing now.
Dommann: It seems that you have the typical biography of someone who is in science and technology studies. Most of us move between the disciplines. The first paper I read of yours was the paper you wrote together with your colleague Benjamin Straumann, Acquiring Empire by Law. This is a history of the legal concepts of the colonial period dealing with things (especially land) without owners. Your methodology seemed very anthropological to me. So what you just told us about your biography explains a lot. Can you describe how the imperial agents used the corpus of knowledge of the Roman Period concerning the res nullius and terra nullius?
Benton: Well, sure. That was a piece we wanted to write because we noticed there was a debate happening among historians about the way that the doctrine of res nullius (things without owners) was being used by early modern Europeans in empire. The debate was very striking because you had one side saying that Europeans in empire were absolutely applying this Roman legal concept in a very faithful way in making claims to imperial lands through occupation, and on the other side, you had scholars saying they were not applying it at all, in fact they were recognizing sovereignty and acquiring territory by purchase and their reasoning had nothing to do with res nullius, although it might have something to do with Roman law.
What we realized was that historians were cherry-picking from the sources – taking out the parts that supported their arguments, and often when you went to the sources you would find that the historical actors were saying both these things in the same sermon or tract. Partly what was happening, was that there was a misunderstanding on the part of many historians about the way people make legal arguments. Europeans were often making inconsistent legal arguments, which is not that unusual. If one is making a legal argument, one throws everything at the wall to see what sticks. So when historians expected to see legal arguments built around a single logic, they were misreading law and failing to understand it as discourse. Now the thing that was very interesting about this, too, was that the people making these legal arguments often did not have any legal training. They were picking up ideas about law somehow from circulating knowledge – from stories about the law, from royal instructions, and sometimes just from their cultural milieu.
I like that article very much, too, because it shows how important the cultural context is and that people pull ideas out of strange places when they are thinking about law. One of the analogies I give my students is about legal culture in the United States, where at any public meeting – it can be a parent-teacher association meeting or a local zoning board meeting – someone will always say, »Oh you can't do that, we'll get sued.« Because there is this litigious kind of culture and people who say that very often don't know what a tort is, have never been sued, have never been involved in a suit, but they live in a legal culture that is just steeped in this idea of litigation. So I think the idea is similar for the early modern setting, one has to study legal culture in order to understand the law, and vice-versa.
Dommann: It's interesting that lawyers use these old legal concepts as tools for their arguments. But historians perceived the Roman law as a stable entity. Roman law is still considered core knowledge in legal studies. I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Europe, students of law still have to study Roman law. Do you think Roman legal concepts are still relevant?
Benton: Well, don't forget I am not a lawyer and I am not law-trained myself. But I certainly know from my law school colleagues that Roman law is not a required subject for law students in the US. I think that has in fact probably contributed to the fact that historians weren't able to see the influence of Roman law in some of the early colonial historical contexts. A lot of that has to do, too, with the myth that Roman law was so much less important to English law than to continental law. Because of that myth there was a kind of writing out of Roman law from the Anglo-American historical tradition. That is being corrected now with some historians writing about the impact of Roman legal ideas recently, although there has in some quarters been an overcorrection, and scholars treat the Roman law influence as a little bit too canonical.
Dommann: I would like to draw attention back to legal knowledge. In your books and papers about early modern law, the legal concepts are always in circulation and far from being stable. They are used and reused by different actors. From a history of knowledge point of view, legal knowledge is comparable to medical knowledge: it is organized by professionals who serve the state and have access to power. As I didn't read a lot about this in your books, I was wondering: What is the role of experts in these imperial settings of law? What kind of legal knowledge is of concern and how is this legal knowledge actually acquired? How do these actors actually get the knowledge they use for different purposes?
Benton: That is a great question. I think there could be in fact a lot more research on this subject than has been done. It varies in different settings and in different times. As I was saying before, you find many imperial and colonial officials who had some legal training, sometimes a lot of legal training, but also many who did not, and they all interacted with one another in shaping colonial legal systems.
In general, my approach has been to gauge the ways legal knowledge influenced colonial politics and the way empires were structured and run, because I see the imperial project as one that was really narrated by law, through law. People who were not legally trained were looking to law to describe the way they wanted to organize empires politically. So I see the influences as much broader than those emanating from people who were designated as the experts. For example, in the book I am just completing with Lisa Ford about legal reordering in the nineteenth-century British Empire, we are finding that military men in the colonies designed many key legal reforms in the empire. Their legal knowledge came from a variety of sources, including hearsay, and impressions they carried from earlier postings. People at the very bottom of the social and political hierarchy also exerted influence on the colonial legal order and operated on the basis of rumor. Slaves in the West Indies responded to rumors about proposed changes to slave law by organizing protests and revolts, and by pushing for slave owners to be held legally responsible for the mistreatment of slaves.
Espahangizi: In your recent work you deal with the notion of legal pluralism. How did the legal culture in this early modern empire come to be so pluralist?
Benton: Empires by definition were legally plural. Legal authority had to be delegated in order for empires to run. In addition, pluralism resulted from the interactions between legal systems imposed by conquerors and the law of the conquered. It was very rare for conquerors to destroy and replace existing legal systems. Much more often they created layered jurisdictional orders. My book Law and Colonial Cultures was about the resulting patterns of legal pluralism. In A Search for Sovereignty, I make the point that there is a close interrelation between the way European jurists and theorists thought about sovereignty as divisible and the construction of very fragmented colonial legal orders. Europeans were used to composite monarchies and, also, accustomed to jurisdictional tangles between church and royal authority, so for them legal pluralism was very familiar. An empire had certain real administrative limits and constraints, too. In many cases legal pluralism came out of a very pragmatic attempt to keep the cost of administration down, to make empire orderly without overextending administrative costs and erecting a huge bureaucracy. So legal pluralism in part resulted from very practical tensions, and there was a nice homology with theoretical approaches. The turn toward a view of sovereignty as indivisible and as closely associated with territorial control happened much later than many scholars suppose.
Dommann: Perhaps for empires it was a successful way to rule or to govern through the use of legal pluralism. Perhaps, this was the only possible way?
Benton: Yes, I mean, to a certain extent it was necessary. But of course the big insight for me, which comes out in Law and Colonial Cultures, is that in the early modern period every legal system was multi-jurisdictional, every legal system was plural, and that was true of European legal systems just as it was true of the legal systems that Europeans were interacting with, and so it was not unusual to find colonial powers engineering multi-jurisdictional legal orders. That really is the way people did law and in fact everyone would expect the legal order to look that way. So, in that context, it's not unusual to be creating more and different varieties of legal pluralism. Does that make sense?
Dommann: Definitely! But for a nineteenth century scholar or a twentieth century scholar, it is unusual. Because history turned the other way around.
Benton: Yes, that is exactly right, and that is part of my argument, too. In the long nineteenth century you begin to see – but from very different angles, not only from the top down – the construction of more claims by the state to hegemony over the legal order.
Dommann: I was asking myself why you stopped at 1900, because the period before WW I is in fact shaped by globalization.
Benton: Oh, it is partly inclination, and maybe partly lack of time. But the more substantive reason is that even though legal pluralism continued beyond 1900, the context changed radically once there was an explicit claim by international lawyers, and others, that sovereign states were the most important entities in the international order. I should add that I work with a couple of people at NYU who study empires in world history, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, and they have written a book about empires in world history that tells a slightly different story. We teach together, we write together, and we have an interesting private debate about whether the nineteenth century marks an important turning point. I see a very important turn happening in the nature of legal pluralism in this long nineteenth century, but Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper consider empire as the dominant organizing principle of world history right through the twentieth century. I think that we probably have a more subtle difference than a stark difference in opinion, I can see their point, but I also think the early modern world was distinctive. I am beginning to work on a book now with Adam Clulow, a historian of early modern Southeast Asia, and we are writing about a set of rubrics and practices that made up what we are calling »interpolity law« in the early modern world. Some of them continue into the present, but not in the same forms.
Dommann: So the rise of the nation state in the late nineteenth century isn't your concern. But it could be interesting to look at what happens exactly at this moment of transformation at the beginning of international law based on nation state law.
Benton: Yes, and you may be happy to know I am finishing a book on the early nineteenth century now and part of the argument there is to recover the early nineteenth century as an influence on these late nineteenth century developments. So I am getting closer. It is certainly important to recognize that in many parts of the world the impulse to create states with claims to legal hegemony developed as part of imperial legal politics, not after the decline of empires. One of the patterns clearly visible through the study of empires is the strengthening of nation-states' legal authority through conflicts with imperial powers.
Espahangizi: In the 1970s, we can observe the rise of legal pluralism studies that criticized the so-called ideology of the centralized state law, which had turned into a dominant legal perspective in the era of the nation state. Seen from this angle, there is in fact a continuity of global legal pluralist orders since the early modern period and throughout the era of the nation state in the nineteenth and twentieth century. How and where can we grasp this continuity?
Benton: In A Search for Sovereignty I define empires as having very fragmented, layered kinds of systems of rule, and being very productive of these zones of legal anomaly. I actually borrowed that phrase anomalous legal zones from someone writing about Washington DC in the late twentieth century. There are zones of legal anomaly in the present world all over the place. The last line of that book says something about Gaza and Guantánamo. You begin to understand those formations much better, I think, when you see how productive earlier systems were of such places. A chapter of that book deals with island penal colonies that virtually all the major empires produced, in the late eighteenth century in particular. And so, clearly, there is continuity. I think there is a lot of continuity in international law, too, and one of the things that the current project is trying to look at is the way that attempts to make imperial law do more work as a global system influenced the development of international law. Certainly you can see continuities of imperial thinking in contemporary international law, though no one talks about them. They are written out.
Dommann: Do you have an example for that?
Benton: Yes, I do. An example would be, say, the implicit connection between protection in empires and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine in international law today. Protection is a very old idea, and it became a key construct in the British Empire, and Lisa Ford and I have written a chapter about the way protection talk was all over the empire. As we were writing this, the conflict in Crimea was emerging and I think that Russia's assertions about its intervention in Crimea in order to protect Russians was very interesting in this regard, because the principle of protection was stated in a way that echoed imperial ideas of protection even though it was meant to formally cite the responsibility to protect doctrine. R2P, as people like to call it, is an interstate period doctrine about when one is allowed to make an intervention across state lines, but the way that Putin was framing protection was very imperial because it included the anticipation of annexation, which is something that was part of the imperial approach to protection but is not at all part of the responsibility to protect doctrine.
Dommann: Do you think that we are witnessing a new imperial age, regarding especially what you just told us about President Putin in Crimea? Is his knowledge on how to rule based on historical techniques, which were already used by sovereigns in the early modern period?
Benton: Yes and no. I don't think that the influence of the empires is gone, I think there are still many imperial constructs and I do see the imperial legacy as an important political force in the contemporary world. One thing, though, is that the way that people use discourse, as you know, is influenced by context. Imperial discourse is very different in the context of, or at least the claim of, an interstate order and the idea of strong state sovereignty. So it isn't the same, there are continuities but it isn't the same. It is important to study political ideas over the long period to trace their changes. This is one of the reasons why I like a world historical perspective, because you don't then lose sight of these continuities and can still search for discontinuities.
Dommann: Yes, you have to look at the longue durée, but also the points of rupture and discontinuities.
Benton: This brings me back to the point about legal pluralism and something I wanted to say before, which is that the main methodological insight that for me came out of my early work, and has continued to influence the way I think about it, is that jurisdictional conflicts were very important to people in their cultural interactions and also in shifting institutional configurations. I began to look for clusters of jurisdictional conflicts, and that is a methodology that has born some fruit for me and has influenced other historians, too. Clusters of jurisdictional conflicts produce institutional shifts in world history, and they are also often accompanied by a great deal of cultural tension. The clusters also don't necessarily occur at the times we normally associate with turning points in world history. I think you could take that methodology and apply it in the contemporary world and see where there are these jurisdictional conflicts of a particular kind and that they emerge around particular issues. It's a good place to look for understanding cultures of law but also for looking for institutional shifts.
Dommann: What is jurisdiction? And how can we study it historically?
Benton: Well, you know, I don't think jurisdiction is terribly mysterious, I just think about it as legal authority essentially, and the reason I like it methodologically is because it is not that difficult to locate and to discuss, it has almost always in these historical settings some contemporary recognition. People in all periods do talk about legal authority, they know who holds it, they have reference points, it's not as if you were naming something categorically that doesn't have a historical name also. It is much more difficult to try to study legal practice as reflecting norms because you can't locate normative orders historically with the same certainty. So I haven't found jurisdiction to be an elusive sort of category, but I do think it's worth bringing out and sharpening a bit. Do you think it requires more elaboration theoretically?
Dommann: No, I think it's a much broader concept than law. There are many more practices involved, from different spheres of society, than just a legal perspective would suggest, and that's what's so interesting about it.
Benton: Yes, I agree with that.
Espahangizi: So, if you take jurisdiction as a main methodological focus, and if you say that, basically, it's a way of solving conflicts with a legal authority involved, what other forms of this conflict solving do we miss?
Benton: I would say it's all a way of performing conflict rather than solving conflict. So the object of analysis is jurisdictional conflicts rather than the solving of jurisdictional conflicts. Sometimes they don't get solved or they get solved in ways that are temporary. So that's maybe a difference from older anthropological approaches in legal anthropology that used to emphasize conflict resolution. An excellent example comes out of the work of Lisa Ford, who wrote a book about the way jurisdictional conflicts between white settlers and indigenous people in North America and Australia produced a very gradual shift in the way that settlers were defining jurisdiction and sovereignty. They slowly moved away from focusing on authority over the person and toward defining jurisdiction as territorial, and that happened in reaction to a whole series of disputes along the frontier, a lot of them having to do with violence and crime. Or another example is from my own work on British-controlled parts of India. The British designed an elaborate system of legal pluralism in which they had limited jurisdiction, and then Indian litigants, often using very sophisticated legal strategies, began to use the jurisdictional complexity in ways the British hadn't anticipated, mainly through bringing cases to courts where it wasn't clear they had standing to sue, and by insisting they should be recognized by those courts, and as a result of this jurisdictional politics it was impossible for the British to create fixed jurisdictional boundaries.
Espahangizi: So maybe I should specify: You understand jurisdiction as a way of performing conflict rather than a way of solving conflict. But there are other performances of conflict, such as, for example, protests or violence. How can we link jurisdiction to these forms of performing conflict?
Benton: They are certainly linked and they are certainly linked to violence. The relationship to violence is one that is particularly interesting, and again, one finds that looking at the imperial and colonial histories, you tend to shift around some of the expected categories. Much of the colonial history that has focused on law shows something very interesting, which is that people who are protesting against colonial rule don't regard legal protest as something that should be conducted separately from, or in exclusion to, violence. So you have settings in which people are violently protesting against a colonial legal regime or reform, and at the same they are bringing action in court.
Espahangizi: Could you give us an example?
Benton: Sure, the best example is not from my own work but from the work of someone named Sergio Serulnikov, who worked on protests in the Andes in the late eighteenth century. He traces these Indian groups who were responding to Bourbon reforms by attacking local judges, corregidores, but at the same time they were sending delegations to walk miles and miles to get to the audiencia, the high court, to make a formal complaint, and they were doing both these things, the same group. So they didn't regard law as something that was separate from violent protest, they were actually doing both at the same time. It's pretty interesting.
Espahangizi: So, if the legal appeal is not only a posture or an empty gesture, why do they do it? Is there a kind of belief behind it, or is this just theatre?
Benton: Oh no, it's not just theatre – although there is always an element of theatre in law. I do think that we should not underestimate the sense of devotion people have, as well as the strong sense about justice and how it's supposed to work, and the outcomes that it's supposed to be able to give them. This isn't purely theoretical, though, and it isn't purely philosophical, and it isn't purely religious, even though it always intersects with all those ways of thinking. When people think about justice, they also think about justice procedurally, they think about justice in terms of jurisdiction and having just outcomes be decided by people who are legitimate to them, and these are things that they think about simultaneously, it's very difficult to pull them apart in fact.
Espahangizi: So there is a kind of possibility of justice behind it that …
Benton: Yes, I think so. In Law and Colonial Cultures, I have a last chapter that is really all about this very short intervention made by E.P. Thompson in the book that he wrote about law, Whigs and Hunters, and that intervention of his was very upsetting to people who read Thompson as a Marxist historian only, because he says the rule of law is a good thing, and he upset a lot of people. But what he actually says in that chapter is that it's very important to realize that people often act based on their expectation that there is a tiny possibility of justice being done, and they will opt into political institutions and political frameworks even if there is a very small chance of justice and a very large chance of injustice. That seemed to me a very interesting insight that explains a lot of participation in very unequal kinds of systems and also in very skewed legal orders, where legal outcomes really are difficult to predict, or it's difficult to predict that justice will happen. So you know, why do the Indians in Serulnikov's case walk hundreds of miles to get to the audiencia? They perceive a very slim possibility that a just outcome is possible, so they are participating in this legal order.
Espahangizi: What role does this legal participation of the oppressed or subalterns play in the emergence of the centralized state law we were talking about earlier? There is a pessimistic narrative that tells us the history of the nation state legal order is about rule and control. But you seem to suggest another story?
Benton: Well, I do partly make an argument that is something like that, I argue that out of the jurisdictional politics and the jurisdictional jockeying of the colonial order, in many cases there was an appeal for the creation of a state-dominated legal order, and that came from below as much as it did from above. Sometimes it had to do with people's desire to have predictability in law, when historical actors wanted a state, or somebody, to just provide predictability even if it was a bad kind of predictability. Sometimes it was better to have reliable expectations than to have none because then you had information to work with in devising new strategies.
Espahangizi: So this would be the dark side of legal pluralism? In the legal pluralism studies since the 1980s, legal pluralism is perceived as a good thing, the bad thing is centralized state law. How did we get there? As far as I can see, legal pluralism emerged as a concept and research program in the twentieth century through an anthropological encounter with the colonial world, and it was at first linked to »primitive« cultures, and then, in the 1970s, the concept was reversed towards western societies. Is there a link between the nineteenth century world and the rise of legal pluralist studies in the early twentieth century?
Benton: I guess I don't think about it in terms of »good« and »bad«. I think you are right in characterizing some of that literature as creating that kind of opposition between state law and non-state law. In a sense I would say my intervention has to do with saying that this duality is a kind of false structure, that we shouldn't be coding legal practices in that sort of way. A historical approach is very fundamental to making that correction, because unless you see that legal pluralism really was in fact the way the world worked and the way law worked across the early modern world, in Europe as well as outside Europe, then you can fall very easily into a Eurocentric approach and to a state-centered approach, and unless you take the longue durée approach to history you can operate with a very settled, and false, perspective of what state law is. And you're right. The earlier approaches to legal pluralism did come straight out of anthropology, they came out of an anthropological context that in turn was influenced by these views of the traditional, the primitive, and if you look at those anthropological approaches, it took a long time to get out of that way of thinking about a sharp distinction between formal and informal law. Even some people who professed to be complicating the picture held on to this distinction longer than they should have.
Dommann: What you described as the historical methodology that is used for the description of processes instead of the stating of norms seems quite familiar to historians of science. It's a descriptive approach contrary to a normative approach. Is there a danger that the outcome of this is just relativism?
Benton: Well, there is, I suppose. But one doesn't have to go all the way toward relativism. There is a move towards a kind of post-modernist perspective that suggests there is no world-historical narrative and we should get away from all narratives. I have actually remained fairly interested in the grand narrative, and I think we can use cultural analysis and similar approaches to construct new narratives, and so I think that I am not a poststructuralist in that sense.
If you take this approach to legal pluralism or jurisdictional conflicts and layer it into world-historical narratives you get some different chronological breaks, you get a different way of seeing some shifts in global ordering, but you can still arrive at a narrative, not just at a big soup in which everything is floating around. I am not so interested in the soup. I suspect we are past the point where that's going to be the outcome of our interest; I think the fashion of a kind of cultural studies approach to everything is over. We can still, though, use some of the insights of that approach to do other things.
Espahangizi: So we can learn from history?
Benton: I hope so!
Espahangizi: Ok, that's good to know.
Dommann: There is one more question I would like to ask, because you studied the early modern period of the colonies so profoundly. The Europeans brought along some norms to the »new« world, for example common law, and then they transformed it. Many contemporary legal scholars stress the difference between American law and European law. There are people talking about a cultural gap between these two cultures. Sometimes I think it's a political argument. What do you think about these discussions as you have studied the transfer of legal concepts over the ocean back and forth?
Benton: I tend to be skeptical about cultural-gap arguments. You know, when I started working on this, I was not very interested in the legal history of my own country, but then, after studying colonial history, I began to see the history of the United States as a part of the world history of empires, not in the nationalistic vein that used to dominate the subject. And when you look at the legal history of the North American colonies in this broader context, you see that there really wasn't just an Anglo-legal imprint on the colonies, the colonists created the common law in America out of a political process that had to do with their own internal struggles as well as tensions with the empire. So the legal tradition looks much more contingent and much less programmed by its heritage. In general, I tend to be much more interested in the way that people can use legal categories to communicate across legal systems fairly well without a lot of difficulty, and I tend to think that people understand strategic thinking on the part of others fairly well, so that they are not mystified very often by other peoples approaches to the law.
Now let me turn the question around and ask you. How do you see this kind of thinking about law as relevant to your thinking about the history or sociology of knowledge?
Dommann: Yes, perhaps you know that I started as a historian of science, I did my PhD about X-rays, and then I turned to the history of law studying copyright. I tried to study legal knowledge in the same fashion as I did with other corpuses of knowledge before. I realized that it's quite difficult. But I observed some specific characteristics of legal thinking, for example, that history or the use of history is quite important. So I think we are still at the beginning of a history of knowledge of legal concepts. When I read your paper about res nullius, I realized how the history of law could be done quite differently from the way it was done before when it was still largely perceived from the view point of a history of ideas: to look at legal concepts, to study how they are transformed, how they are used and reused. But I think we are still at the beginning, really at the beginning compared to other disciplines where the process has a much longer tradition.
This kind of research is always accompanied by tensions because you enter another field with already established experts asking: What are these guys doing in our garden now?
Benton: I've had mostly a very good experience with legal scholars because legal history has changed radically as a field in the last fifteen years. It is much more open than it was to different approaches, it used to be much more closed and more focused on a narrower set of questions.
Dommann: Until recently, the history of law was predominated by a history of ideas approach. If you try to follow a practical turn, it's a completely different picture you get.
Benton: Yes, you ask very different questions. I think I benefitted from being outside the legal profession in studying law. It meant that I was never tempted to ask doctrinal questions, and it also meant that I could combine very different kinds of sources. When I was starting my work on A Search for Sovereignty I just asked the general question, if people were not claiming territorial sovereignty in early modern European empires, then what were they doing, and what kinds of legal ideas and practices were they using? And that led me to read a wide variety of sources, and ultimately to some quirky results. There is a chapter, for example, about the European imagination of riverine regions and about the way that Europeans saw rivers as central to colonial ventures but then imagined upriver regions as politically dangerous places where it was especially hard to constitute political communities. I came to this conclusion from reading accounts of river travel and finding treason cases coming up all over the place. That is an association – between the conquest of river regions and the law of treason – that you would not get from someone who studies traditional legal history or even traditional intellectual history. A practice-based approach, as you describe it, means you can begin by reading what people were writing about, how they were narrating their experience, what kind of legal language they were using, and what sorts of legal practices they were invoking. I am sure it's similar in the history of science, where you have to know some science, but if you are not thinking like a scientist, you ask completely different kinds of questions.
Espahangizi: Earlier, you said there is hope that we can learn something from all this. I really find that appealing. A lot of us are struggling with the case of economic globalization and legal pluralism in a capitalist world order. Take, for example, the ongoing negotiations on the transatlantic free trade agreement and the plan to institute arbitrary tribunals for investor–state dispute settlements. How can we perform a democratic conflict if the tribunal is out of reach? And what would be the possibility of achieving justice in this kind of globalized economic jurisdiction?
Benton: I am happy to say, or unhappy to say, I don't know. I think these are good questions to think about and I think you should think about them. Although I am an optimist about a great many of things I am not especially optimistic that an emancipatory agenda will be the outcome of my scholarship. I just don't know if that will be the case. I do think there are things that come out of it which are analytically useful to people, in grappling with contemporary problems. The problem you allude to involves, essentially, a jurisdictional conflict, and the history of jurisdictional conflicts suggests that we should not expect a lot of stability in the jurisdictional power of any international forums.
Dommann: Is there also a liberal reading of legal pluralism? Or is it used, for example, in economic theory? Are you aware of any such cases?
Benton: These are good questions, only partly answerable through historical scholarship. One of the insights that comes out of imperial legal history is that the distinctions between neo-authoritarianism and liberalism are often very blurred. For example, in the early nineteenth century, the British Empire was engaged in a massive project to strengthen imperial legal authority in plural legal orders, and this was occurring exactly at the same time that big projects were also under way to enforce a ban on slave trading and to open new markets to British goods. Some so-called humanitarian reformers thought the only way to get massive reform to happen was to create a counter-revolutionary empire with a strong, even autocratic, imperial government at the center. And some free-trade reformers thought the same thing. It has become very difficult – and it would even be misleading – to describe what they were doing as creating the origins of global liberalism, although there were elements of liberalism present in these various political and economic projects. In other words, you get a much more nuanced history of liberalism when you look at legal ordering as an important dimension of social, economic, and cultural experience.
Dommann: Yes, I think that is quite interesting.
Benton: And I do think there is going to be a lot more work coming up, I would say, in the next five to ten years, on the relation between political economy, law and legal pluralism, and imperial law. Institutional economists have now become interested in analyzing legacies of imperial institutions, and historians are returning now to political economy as a subject after a long hiatus. I hope that legal history will be a part of both projects.
Dommann: Well, do you have any more questions, Kijan?
Espahangizi: A lot more, we are just starting to have fun …
Benton: Well I just want to say thank you for having read and thought about this material so much. I really appreciate it. It's always nice to have such a good in-depth conversation.
Lauren A. Benton
ist Rechtshistorikerin und seit Juli 2015 Dean of the College of Arts and Science an der Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee (vorher NYU, Department of History). Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Kolonial- und imperiales Recht sowie die Geschichte des Internationalen Rechts. Ihre Studie Law and Colonial Cultures wurde 2003 mit dem Preis der Wild History Association und dem James Willard Hurst Book Prize ausgezeichnet.
Monika Dommann
ist Professorin für die Geschichte der Neuzeit an der Universität Zürich. Sie forschte und lehrte u.a. an der Universität Basel, am Internationalen Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) in Weimar, dem German Historical Institut (GHI) in Washington, dem Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, an der McGill University in Montreal und dem Internationalen Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK) in Wien. Zu ihren Forschungsschwerpunkten gehören die Verflechtungen der Alten und Neuen Welt, die Geschichte materieller Kulturen, die Geschichte immaterieller Güter, die Geschichte der Logistik, die Geschichte des Marktes und seiner Grenzen, die Geschichte von Bild- und Tonspeichern sowie die Methodologie und Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft.
Weitere Texte von Monika Dommann bei DIAPHANES
Handling, Flowcharts, Logistik. Zur Wissensgeschichte und Materialkultur von Warenflüssen
In: David Gugerli (Hg.), Michael Hagner (Hg.), Caspar Hirschi (Hg.), Andreas B. Kilcher (Hg.), Patricia Purtschert (Hg.), Philipp Sarasin (Hg.), Jakob Tanner (Hg.), Nach Feierabend 2011
Recording Prints, Reading Films. Mikrofilme, amerikanische Kosmopoliten und die Entdeckung des Copyrightproblems in den 1930er Jahren
In: Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (Hg.), Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 3
Zwischen Eisenbahn und Lager. Eine Archäologie der Rampe
In: Kijan Malte Espahangizi (Hg.), Barbara Orland (Hg.), Stoffe in Bewegung
In: Monika Dommann (Hg.), Kijan Malte Espahangizi (Hg.), Svenja Goltermann (Hg.), Nach Feierabend 2015
180 Sekunden, 2 Angriffe, 6 Tote: CAD als forensische Zeitkapsel. Ein Kommentar zur Drohnen-Fallstudie Nr. 4 der Forensic Architecture Research Group
Grundrechte sind der Riss in der Mauer der Macht. Interview mit Susanne Baer, Bundesverfassungsrichterin
Umbrüche am Ende der Linotype
In: Nils Güttler (Hg.), Margarete Pratschke (Hg.), Max Stadler (Hg.), Nach Feierabend 2016
Donna, Isabelle, Vinciane etc.: Warum wir in der Zukunft mehr feministische Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung brauchen werden
In: Sandra Bärnreuther (Hg.), Maria Böhmer (Hg.), Sophie Witt (Hg.), Nach Feierabend 2020
Introduction: Unobservable Practices? Methodologies of Media History
In: Ulrike Bergermann (Hg.), Monika Dommann (Hg.), Erhard Schüttpelz (Hg.), Jeremy Stolow (Hg.), Nadine Taha (Hg.), Connect and Divide
From Documentary Practices to WikiLeaks. Interview with Lisa Gitelman, by Monika Dommann
Kijan Malte Espahangizi
ist Wissenshistoriker und Geschäftsführer des Zentrums »Geschichte des Wissens« der ETH & Universität Zürich. Er hat an den Universitäten Köln und Sevilla Geschichte und Physik studiert. Von 2006 bis 2010 war er wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Professur für Wissenschaftsforschung der ETH Zürich. 2010 beendete er seine Promotion mit dem Titel Wissenschaft im Glas. Eine historische Ökologie moderner Laborforschung. Er leitet die Redaktion von Nach Feierabend. Zürcher Jahrbuch für Wissensgeschichte. Seine Forschungsinteressen sind Wissensgeschichte, Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte, materielle Kulturen, Historische Epistemologie, Ökologie und Anthropologie, Erinnerungskulturen, Migrationsgeschichte.
Weitere Texte von Kijan Malte Espahangizi bei DIAPHANES
»Immutable Mobiles« im Glas. Grenzbetrachtungen zur Zirkulationsgeschichte nicht-inskribierter Objekte
Stofftrajektorien. Die kriegswirtschaftliche Mobilmachung des Rohstoffs Bor, 1914–1919 (oder: was das Reagenzglas mit Sultan Tschair verbindet)
Pseudo-Smaragde, Flussmittel und bewegte Stoffe. Überlegungen zu einer Wissensgeschichte der materiellen Welt
Migrationswissensgesellschaft!? Ein Versuch zur Triangulation sozialer Wirklichkeit im begrifflichen Scherbenhaufen der Spätmoderne
b€ 30,00 pgratis
Monika Dommann (Hg.), Kijan Malte Espahangizi (Hg.), Svenja Goltermann (Hg.)
Nach Feierabend 2015
Wissen, was Recht ist
Obwohl Recht auf Wissen zurückgreift und neues Wissen produziert, ist der epistemische Status von Gesetzen, Gerichtsentscheidungen, Rechtsansprüchen und Gerechtigkeitsvorstellungen in der wissensgeschichtlichen Forschung bislang wenig beleuchtet worden. Diese Ausgabe untersucht den breiten Fundus von Wissen, der bei der Formulierung von Rechts- und Gerechtigkeitsansprüchen ebenso ins Spiel kommt wie bei Praxen des Anklagens, Ermittelns oder Urteilens. Auf welche Weise und in welcher Form finden dabei Wissensbestände aus anderen Disziplinen, Gesellschaftssphären und kulturellen Bereichen Eingang in die Rechtspraxis? Wie wirkt das Recht auf die Fabrikation von Wissen ein? Und welche Rolle spielen Kriterien und Praktiken der Rechtfertigung, der Zeugenschaft und der Macht?
Monika Dommann, Kijan Malte Espahangizi, ...
»A Just Outcome is Possible.«. An Interview about Legal Pluralism, Jurisdictional Conflicts and Imperial Law in Historical Perspective	ABO
Lauren A. Benton, Monika Dommann, ...
Soziologische Rechtsästhetik
Andreas Fischer-Lescano
Das moderne Recht und die Krise des gemeinsamen Wissens
Thomas Vesting
Vom Recht, sein Wissen kundzutun. Zeugenschaft im Spannungsfeld von Evidenz und Gerechtigkeit
Sibylle Schmidt
Den Staat an seine Gesetze erinnern. Dissidenz als Wissen vom Recht
Sylvia Sasse
Case: Drone Strikes. Auszug: Introduction, Case Studies No. 2 & 4
Geschichten der Gewalt: Über Rechtswissen, Zeugen und Politik. Ein Kommentar zu Forensic Architecture
Svenja Goltermann
Political Justice. The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends
Otto Kirchheimer
»Political Justice«: Otto Kirchheimer und die Formierung eines wissenschaftlich-politischen Begriffs
Ruben M. Hackler, Lucia Herrmann
Susanne Baer, Monika Dommann, ...
Maschinenraum des Rechts. Das Innenleben des Verfassungsgerichts aus künstlerischer Forschungsperspektive

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


This past Wednesday, the crew used their training night to clean out and re-stock the containment trailer.
This trailer is used for fuel spills other liquid spills. It contain booms, pads, protective clothing, oil dry, and other materials that might be needed to contain a spill.
New members received training on the how to deploy booms and when this equipment may need to be used.
Lt. Tommy Trego providing the instruction.


The 2nd annual sell out Women in Biz Conference is the gathering place for all professional, self employed & entrepreneurial women to network and learn new skills over two fun filled days in downtown Toronto. Attendees enjoy free workshops (Mentorship and Gift of Fear - Business Intuition), conference sessions, business coaching and networking parties where you can connect and learn from liked minded women in a beautiful setting overlooking Lake Ontario on May 31st & June 1st, 2012.
Complimentary childcare can be arranged for all attendees courtesy of Kids & Company.
The conference features noted author and CityLine regular: Kimberley Seldom as well as CBC's Nora Young and radio personality Judy Croon just to name a few. WIBN speakers will inspire and educate with practical content in areas such as social media, marketing, branding and business planning. Free business coaching is available with MBA All Star founders.
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Eloctate is an anti-bleeding factor derived from recombinant DNA that is used to treat children and adults with hemophilia A.
Its maker, also known as Eloctate, developed it to prevent bleeding episodes and treat them when they occur. This includes bleeding during or after an operation.
Scientists create recombinant DNA in a laboratory. The work involves taking DNA from different sources to produce combinations that would not occur naturally. The new combinations have properties that can be useful against diseases, including hemophilia A, which is deficient in clotting factor VIII.
Eloctate is the first recombinant clotting factor VIII therapy designed to stay in the body for a considerable period.
Its namesake company used Fc fusion technology to develop it. This involves fusing factor VIII to what is called the Fc portion of a protein known as immunoglobulin G subclass 1, or IgG1. The idea behind the fusing was to use a naturally occurring pathway to extend the time Eloctate would stay in the body.
The clotting factor VIII used in Eloctate is derived from recombinant DNA in a kidney cell line.
The recommended starting dose of Eloctate for adults is 50 intravenous units per kilogram of a patient's weight every four days. Adjustments are likely to be made every three to five days, so that doses end up ranging from 25 to 65 IU/kg. In children 6 and younger, the recommended starting dose is 50 IU/kg twice a week.
Some people who take Eloctate need more frequent doses, or doses that are higher — up to 80 IU/kg.
A problem for some people taking the therapy is that their bodies produce antibodies against Eloctate, called inhibitors, that prevent it from working properly over time.
The most frequent side effects of Eloctate are headaches, rashes, joint pain, muscle pain, and general discomfort.


My year list this year has reached a record total of 173 bird species and I have seen 17 (possibly 18) new species: Red-throated Diver (Spurn), Curlew Sandpiper (Spurn), Red-necked Phalarope (Rutland Water), Grey Phalarope (Old Moor RSPB), Green Sandpiper (Willington GP), Spotted Redshank (Old Moor RSPB), Mediterranean Gull (Spurn), Sandwich Tern (Spurn), Arctic Skua (Spurn), Nightjar (Thetford), Lesser Spotted Woodpecker (Renishaw Gardens), Red-backed Shrike (Spurn), Waxwing (Buxton), Garden Warbler (Williamthorpe GP), Yellow Wagtail (Spurn), Hawfinch (Kingsley) and Common Rosefinch (Spurn). The 18th new species was a possible Black Guillemot on the coast of Arisaig.
I started training to ring in February with Geoff Mawson. Since then I have self ringed 41 species and seen many more in the hand. Some of my personal favourite species have been Kingfisher, Kestrel, both Pied and Spotted Flycatchers, Whinchat, Stonechat, Dipper, Fieldfare, Redwing, Jay, Magpie and Redstart. We have also ringed twice in our garden. In spring I'm hoping to ring chicks in nests and nest boxes.
This year I have seen several new bird species on my local patch. These include Meadow Pipit, Reed Bunting, Teal, Tufted Duck, Green Woodpecker, Peregrine and most recently Brambling. Another highlight has been seeing Badgers in our garden. We've been able to record a total of 56 moth species this year including 40 macros and 16 micros. Hopefully our list total will increase when I use the moth trap I got for Christmas. We also had several Southern Hawker dragonflies hatch out in our pond and we also had Large Red and Azure Damselflies mating.
The highlight of 2018 for me was going to my first BTO Birdcamp where I saw lots of amazing species including Nightjar. We also participated in a Bioblitz at Prees Heath in Shropshire which was part of Chris Packham's Bioblitz campaign. I was also a finalist for the Spurn Young Birder of the Year competition.
Overall, 2018 has been a brilliant year and hopefully 2019 will be even better!


In this paper, three different data sets were used to test the efficiency of dye-swap normalization. The complete data was normalized using different packages of the Bioconductor project and the filtered data using Arraynorm (www.genome.tugraz.at). To guarantee the reproducibility of the results, we provide here the code used to normalize each data set.


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Today, May 9th, has been named Teacher's Day. It is a day set aside to thank and honor the positive impact teachers make on our communities throughout the year. In honor of the many great educators working with smith & beta we will be celebrating our teachers not only today, but all month long. Matt Lemay has been teaching with smith & beta since the very beginning and has become one of our most well rounded and sought after educators. We sat down with Matt to discuss his love for teaching, experience with smith & beta and the value of active listening.


*Scamell Pioneer 6X4 Trator, 총 3,414량이 생산되어 전차수송,구난차량,포견인 차량으로 오랜기간 활약한 차량.
14개의 런너로 많은 부품으로 이루어진 킷.
590개의 부품으로 구성된 실물을 충실히 재현한 정밀 킷.
Amendment to the part numbers in Step 21 for the front tyre assembly.
The Scammell Pioneer was a British 6x4 tractor used in the Second World War as an artillery tractor, recovery vehicle and tank transporter. Pioneers purchased by the British Army were equipped with a 102 bhp Gardner 6 cylinder diesel engine.
The productionof the tank transporter begun in 1937, although the prototype had been built already in 1932. The production variant was equipped with a longer chassis and extended cab to accommodate the tank crew as passengers and larger rear wheels than the Artillery tractor and Recovery vehicle variants. 20 ton Pioneer TRCU20 trailer and 30 ton Pioneer TRMU30/TRCU30 tractor and trailer combinations were delivered, in both cases with the trailer fixed to the tractor. Hinged ramps were used to get the tank onto the trailer, which could be pulled on with the tractor unit's winch.
선주문 두개나 했다 빨리 나왔으면..
IBG가 곧 나오는데 우릴 힘들게 하네,그래도 썬더를 기다린다.
썬더 모델의 스카멜 스리즈 출시와 함께 올해 최고의 뉴스다.
관심많은 이런류의 차량들이 연이어 나온다니 좋다.
이 스카멜 탱크 수송차량은 처음이자 유일한 킷이다.
기본차대 부터 IBG거 보다 휠씬 좋다.런너나 보고있지 않고 난 두 브렌드 다 만들어 보았다.
킷의 정확도와 조립성이 중요한데 썬더게 더 좋다.
썬더측이 만든 스카멜이 디테일과 품질이 높다 .
IBG 박스아트 좋아 보이지만 패스 한다.
썬더 모델측의 폴란드 대리점이 IBG로서 Tank Trailer를 않만든다 하고 Thunder Model 모르게 출시 발표를 했다.


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This place is amazing. Beautiful space, lovely people and a plethora of services. My hot stone winter special with the wonderful Tracey has me floating on air hours later. The massage beds are especially comfortable. We shall definitely be back.
Best massage therapists in the west, thoroughly recommended five stars.
The micro dermabrasion treatment has left my skin glowing everyone commented on my skin at my 4oth soo happy - thank you .
Have had regular lymphatic massages with Rochelle over many years - she is amazing - excellent results - a wonderful relaxing environment.
Very peaceful and relaxing, friendly staff. Would definitely recommend to anyone looking for an amazing experience.
Such a relaxing place, I look forward to my treatments for weeks.


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religion-and-politics
The Illiberal Turn of French Laïcité
Philippe Portier 22 December 2020
France, just like the rest of Europe, has changed so much since 1905 that socio-political pressures to review the relation between State and religions has become a must. The bill recently put forward by its government aims at a global reform that would, if passed, directly impact freedom of worship, claims Philippe Portier.
Religion, Society
State and Church in Russia: Has the Love Faded?
Rebecca Batley 20 October 2020
Church and State have always been intertwined in Russia: under Tsarism God was inextricably linked to the Tsar. However recently all this has begun to change. Last year many Orthodox supporters took part in the pro democracy protests in Moscow: religious opposition to Putin is growing, there can be no doubt of that, but what this means for a government that is so intimately intertwined with the Russian Orthodox church is unclear.
Religion, Sociology
Turkey's Nationalist Drift, in the Words of Hannah Arendt
Riccardo Cristiano 19 November 2019
Riccardo Cristiano interviews for Reset DOC political scientist Cengiz Aktar on the Turkish nationalist-authoritarian shift. A 360 degrees picture of Turkish society and its relationship with politics, religion and the Kurdish question.
Philosophy, Religion
A Multiple Belonging: Recovering Gandhi's Religious Vision
Rajeer Bhargava 4 October 2019
Gandhi's religious vision encouraged multiple attachments, multiple belongings, and multiple religious identities. Is it not time that we challenge the idea of religion as an exclusive monolith.
Don't Tolerate Intolerance
Giuliano Amato 2 September 2019
Kashmir Simmers Under India's Siege
Maria Tavernini 28 August 2019
Kashmir has been buried under a thick silence. Local newspapers' websites were last updated on August 4th while reporters had to transport their articles and photos out of the state on USBs, and many got their footages deleted. The government claims everything is under control and going back to "normal", while pharmacies are running out of medicines due to the curfew and ban on movements.
What is the public role of faith in today's globalised world?
Samuele Sangalli 18 February 2016
Given the persistent vitality of religion, one could ask, where is its place in the "public forum" of our contemporary secularized world? Recognizing its current unavoidable presence, what can we wish for the positive future of human society? These two questions are answered by Mons. Samuele Sangalli in his introduction to the book "Religion and Politics" and summarize the core inspiration of the book itself; which contains contributions made by the participants of the Sinderesi School during the Academic Year 2014-2015. ResetDoc is pleased to share the introduction to the book with its readers. "Religion and Politics" will be presented on the 24th of February 2016 at 5.30 pm in the Aula Magna of the Pontificia Università Gregoriana - Piazza della Pilotta 4 (Rome).


SOMERSET, N.J.—(December 7, 2015) — Raritan, a leading provider of intelligent data center management and rack power distribution solutions, today introduced an all new Branch Circuit Monitoring (BCM) system that provides real-time views of electrical capacity and power usage in colocation and other data centers. The new system supports real-time branch circuit monitoring at the panelboard, floor power distribution unit, remote power panel or overhead busway.
To monitor power consumption upstream from IT equipment racks, the new BCM leverages the technology of Raritan's third-generation intelligent rack PDUs. Visibility into the entire power chain is vital to managing data center health. For example, if a circuit's current approaches a breaker's limit, the BCM sends an alert to staff who can act to prevent a cascading failure. The BCM is also modular, meaning it can be scaled as and when needed, making it more cost effective than competitive solutions.
For colocation data centers, BCM offers visibility into how much power their customers' equipment is using and helps enforce service level agreements (SLAs). It measures KWh with ISO/SEC +/- 0.5% billing-grade accuracy. It also collects data on: A, V, kW, kVA, and power factor. The data is remotely accessible via a web-based interface, or locally on a high-resolution color display or tablet.
The system can easily be configured by uploading the panel schedule via USB stick, thus eliminating manual input errors. Information gathered by the BCM system can be shared with a building management system (BMS) or data center infrastructure management (DCIM) power monitoring software, such as from Raritan partner, Sunbird Software. The BCM also supports environmental sensors for monitoring temperature and humidity.
The new easy-to-install modular system consists of power meter controllers (PMC), power metering modules (PMM), current transformers (CTs), and a variety of enclosures. During installation, the system auto-senses the direction of CT installation and adjusts orientation to prevent costly mistakes requiring reinstallation. There is no disruption to existing services because the current transformers can be snapped around live circuits without power to equipment racks being cut off.
"The Raritan Branch Circuit Monitor will allow us to easily scale our monitoring solution to suit our rapidly changing needs without a large capital outlay. The BCM approach provides accurate insight on customer installations while preserving the line of demarcation between our equipment and our customer's equipment. In short, we now have a complete picture of our power infrastructure."—Paul Carr, Data Center Manager-Data Center Services at Unisys.
"We like the BCM kit because it's compact and easy to install and configure. It provides many useful features that enable us to have full visibility over rack power consumption, available power capacity, and capacity thresholds. It's as simple as that!"—Aurel Vasilescu, Regional Datacenter Facility Development at T-Mobile Czech Republic.
The Raritan BCM is available worldwide starting today through Raritan's extensive reseller channel and distributors. It is available as a branch circuit monitor kit and busway monitor kit. The BCM is simple enough for a licensed electrician to install and configure. Mounting options available include subfloor, wall mount, IT rack, and DIN rail.
Raritan, a Legrand Company, is a proven innovator of power management solutions and KVM-over-IP for data centers of all sizes. In over 76 countries and 50,000 locations worldwide, Raritan's award-winning hardware solutions increase energy efficiency, improve reliability, and raise productivity. For more information, visit us at Raritan.com or follow us on the Raritan blog.


"How do you do this every day?"
A question I was asked back in April was how do I put little bits of me out in the open every day? How do I just lay my experiences out for everyone to see?
The truth is, while these are very much my experiences, they don't feel like it when I'm writing about them. The exception to that is the sexual assault because it's so recent and raw. With everything else, I've changed so much since it all started, that I no longer feel like the same person. I feel like I'm writing about someone else's experiences.
I think at this stage, there's a feeling of complete emotional separation from the girl who self harmed, and who felt so much self loathing that she thought the world would be better off without her. It sounds strange, but I think I said goodbye to that girl in December, hours before the assault. I sat on a bench beside the Hudson in New Jersey and sobbed. I looked at the New York horizon across the river, two years to the day since I took my last overdose, and I realised I was a completely different person.
It would be harder if I were writing about sexual assault every day. That's not to say that I don't still struggle with the anxiety, the depression, the self harm, or even the suicidal thoughts. Believe me, I do. When I do, I end up fighting a tough battle. I then wake up the following day, still on track with recovery, and feeling pretty proud of myself.
When people comment on how much they've watched me change in the space of a year, I cry. Every time, without fail, I cry. That's because I'm glad that someone else can see the change too. There are days that I don't see it, or I forget. One thing's for sure though, when I remember, there are mixed feelings. There's pain because I wish I could tell the girl that I once was that she is going to get through what she's feeling, that she isn't worthless. There's also joy that I'm no longer that girl.


Countless Twitter users have expressed a desire to edit their tweets after sending them, which would enable the users to fix their tweets' mistakes without having to delete the tweets and write new ones. However, Twitter is yet to add this capability to its social media platform. So, if you want to show Twitter that we, its users, want to be able to #EditTweets, sign this petition and share it with our fellow Twitter users!
Should you especially want to be able to #EditTweets, feel free to protest the lack of this function on Twitter by intentionally tweeting with grammatical errors in addition to the hashtag "#EditTweets" and a link to this petition. Also feel free to reply with the same hashtag and link to others' tweets featuring mistakes that could easily be fixed with a quick edit.
This petition is advocating a method of editing tweets, which you may interchangeably call the #WarenoticeWay or the #MummaMethod, that you can learn more about in the embedded Warenotice video. Also, feel free to follow this petition's creator, Shane Mumma from the technology YouTube channel Warenotice, on Twitter at @Warenotice and @TheShaneMumma for updates on this petition to #EditTweets! If we all work together, Twitter's inability to #EditTweets may soon be a thing of the past!
Please share my name and email address with Warenotice, so that I can receive updates on this campaign and others.
Warenotice needs your help with "Twitter: Let Us #EditTweets". Join Warenotice and 2,014 supporters today.


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THE LEGEND OF DATASOFT - TEES OF STYLE
The Legend Of Datasoft: A True Underdog Story
Formed in the early Eighties by entrepreneur Pat Ketchum, Datasoft quickly established itself on the Atari, Apple II and Commodore 64 computers in particular.
Yet despite a selection of licensed games, culled from either popular media or arcade videogames, the company is today regarded as an underdog, a publisher that flew slightly under the radar with its excellent and diverse games.
Of those licences, the most famous is probably Bruce Lee, the Kung-Fu kicking adaptation of martial arts' most notable exponent. A playable and entertaining platform game, the player takes on the role of the movie star, battling against an evil ninja and the big green warrior, Yamo.
What made Bruce Lee special was its two-player mode, allowing a friend to take on Bruce Lee as Yamo in a battle to the death – a game of death, in fact.
Datasoft also produced original games, and we celebrate these in particular at Seven Squared this week. O'Riley's Mine (named after its creator, Mark Riley), is a fast and frantic twist on Boulder Dash as the player attempts to gather as many treasures as they can while avoiding the enemies – or blowing them up with dynamite!
There's twee graphics and entertainment with Mancopter, one of the more unappreciated shoot-'em-ups on the Commodore 64 and Alternate Reality, an impressive 3D RPG that originated on the Atari 8-bit computers.
Finally, for those with a fondness for all things Sherlock Holmes, there's 221B Baker Street, a head-scratching detective game complete with lovely isometric graphics and some complex riddles to solve. The game is afoot!
These games are a mere snapshot of the journey that Datasoft took in the Eighties, and we are proud to celebrate them with exclusively licensed tees here at Seven Squared.
Plus we also also have a beautiful golden Datasoft tee as suggested by Mark Sharples aka @wotnogravy on Twitter.
We are always listening to retro fans and adapting our designs where possible – follow @SquaredSeven to get involved and start your Tee journey today!
Who knows where the journey will take us next but it is do wonderful to share the memories and engage in such positive conversation together.
Remember, every Tee we sell contributes in part to games industry mental health charity Safe In Our World.
Thanks for being on the journey with us and please do continue to spread the word and share your memories and desires.
Together we are #KeepingTheGameAlive.
Thanks again to Graeme Mason aka Wizwords for his work on this chapter of the story. Go check him out on Twitter as well.


Unity 6.6: Still Regressing On Performance?
These days unity and compiz are like a horse and carriage. The last version of compiz has a regression when it comes to performance. There is a fix but it has not made it to the final repos yet.
The 6 month release cycle is just fine as long as people understand that stable means LTS and the others are just snapshots in the dev cycle that people could (and I mean could) use as a passable OS with various degrees of success. I like 10.04 and used it for a few years but on a separate HDD I always had one distro or another to check up on things and report bugs.
I'm running 12.04 which is an LTS and it's pretty much unusable in many ways. Just load up XBMC and you'll get a nice slideshow.
I've been hearing "fixes are coming in the next version" for six months now and I haven't seen much improvement yet TBH.
It's kind of embarrassing because Linux was supposed to be the lean and efficient version of an OS. Well I guess that was true under GNOME2 but I don't know what the hell is going on these days; it's a huge mess and I wouldn't advise any newcomers to dip their toes into this pool.
The final release of Ubuntu 12.10 will include Compiz 0.9.8.4 and Unity 6.8.0, both of which already have a nice bag of final performance fixes coming with them. Generally, the performance of Ubuntu 12.10 is a LOT better than Ubuntu 12.04 in all areas.
One of the biggest issues is XSync for nvidia.
It will give an example increase of 30FPS to 50FPS.
Looks like fixing it will get Unity on par with KWin. But when they fix one issue they usually introduce another.
Last edited by mark45; 09-29-2012, 02:56 PM.
That's actually one of the reasons I moved to KDE. XBMC was terrible in Unity. Unity's performance became pretty unbearable, as did XBMC's UI. With KWin it's not so bad.
If Xrender extension was improved to support vsync, we would not need opengl compositors that need substantial gpu power to work right.
I'm using Xubuntu 12.10 and xfwm4 is very light and good looking, problem is the tearing because the lack of vsync in all xrender compositors.
Why Valve, why did you have to choose a company who makes such terrible decisions.
Valve could hire Kano and create their own stripped down reference distribution.
What amazes me is that they didn't do such a thing.
Hell, they could even start from the VERY scratch with LFS and use STEAM as a package manager! THAT WOULD BE HILARIOUS.
They could certainly roll their own distro but they really wouldn't need to since X is rather versatile. They could of course just have their own desktop login session (like XBMC) and then the user could just do a switch session. Or better yet just launch Steam on a separate X server.
X is outdated, there's nothing Valve can do about it.


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Instrumentation: harp
From the Same Melancholy Fate
From the Same Melancholy Fate (2015) is an improvisatory piece for any instrumentalist, inspired by visionary artist Cleveland Turner, aka the Flower Man. Pete Gershon, author of Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments, introduces the Flower Man's story this way: "after seventeen years as a homeless alcoholic, he had a near-death experience in the gutter in 1983. Then, a divinely inspired vision of a whirlwind of colorful junk prompted him to devote the rest of his life to brightening his neighborhood and the lives of countless visitors with the deft arrangement of colorful refuse." The Flower Man worked on his whirlwind constantly, roaming the neighborhood to forage for abandoned treasures to add to his ever-evolving yard show. But immediately after the Flower Man's final illness and death (in December 2013), the house and its array of urban detritus began to decay. On 7 February 2015, the city demolished the structure, and it is now a vacant lot. Matt Petty's video documents that day.
The player is given a pre-recorded track which has as its base my reading of Louise Glück's poem recorded and re-recorded in space so that it is engulfed by room resonance (a la Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room), along with additional layers of music and song. The performer records every performance of the piece, and each performance recording becomes the pre-recorded track for the next performance. Thus the original track gradually disappears into the new layers, the performer responds to his/her previous self as part of the counterpoint of sound, and every performer's tape part is unique, a palimpsest of previous performances of the piece.
The title of the piece comes from a gravestone Matt Petty showed me the day after I met him for the first time. In the white people's cemetery in Natchitoches, Louisiana, the gravestone says in its entirety: "Negro, From the Same Melancholy Fate."
Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we–waves
of sky blue like
a critique of heaven: why
do you treasure your voice
when to be one thing
is to be next to nothing?
Why do you look up? To hear
an echo like the voice
of god? You are all the same to us,
solitary, standing above us, planning
your silly lives: you go
where you are sent, like all things,
where the wind plants you,
one or another of you forever
looking down and seeing some image
of water, and hearing what? Waves,
and over waves, birds singing.
• Louise Glück: Scilla: from Wild Iris
In addition to being part of Lighten Up, a multimedia project about visionary visual arts, the piece is also part of my ongoing project A Book of Days. Please visit 19 January to watch and listen to Jessie Nucho's ninth pass on the flute, which I think is the most layered version in existence so far, and I am LOVING it! You can visit 19 October to watch and listen to my most recent (fifth) pass, with a layered video I'm excited about. Yaz Lancaster created a violin version you can hear on 9 May. You can also go here to hear David Steele's second pass on the clarinet, and here to hear Timothy Rosenberg's fourth pass on the saxophone.
To perform From the Same Melancholy Fate, you'll start with the original pre-recorded track (with the optional video.) You'll record your performance of the piece each time you play it, and use that performance recording as the pre-recorded track for your next performance. Gradually, the original track will be obscured under the layers of your successive performances.
I'd love for you to send me performance recordings periodically so I can hear where your version of the piece is going. My idea is to gather a bunch of different versions after some time has passed, and figure out some interesting way to present them as a group.
Please use the PayPal button to purchase the materials. I normally charge $40 for the materials, but I have made it so you can name your own price until public performances are again possible. And thank you for supporting this low-key way of publishing.
Instrumentation: flute oboe clarinet bassoon saxophone trumpet horn trombone tuba percussion (pitched) harp harpsichord synthesizer guitar violin viola cello bass open instrumentation
Video: Yes
Project(s): Lighten Up A Book of Days
When Elizabeth Panzer asked me for a harp piece, I came up with an idea for a big piece based on a poem by Linda Norton (the poet of Landscaping for Privacy) about knitting and the Aran Islands. As the deadline neared, I realized I will need more time to write it, so instead I decided to work with a sweet redemptive pattern I had written as an underscore for an audiobook production of Gerald's Game, one of Stephen King's more horrific novels. The resulting piece is totally diatonic, doesn't even require two octaves, uses standard minimalist variation techniques, and in virtually every way plays nice.
I think it's actually a mean little thing.
There are two recordings available:
The harp version is recorded on Elizabeth Panzer's CD, Dancing in Place.
A toy piano version (played by two people) is the title cut on twisted tutu's CD.
Play Nice is part of my ongoing project, A Book of Days. You can hear a recording by visiting December 5th.
For performing materials, please click the button below. And thanks for supporting this very low-key way of publishing:
Instrumentation: harp toy piano
Ensemble Size: solo 2-6
Machaut a Go-go
Machaut a Go-go adapts both the music and the lyrics of Machaut's virelais "Moult sui de bonne heure née" to the go-go style. Go-go is a jazzy offshoot of rap that flourished in Washington, D.C. a while ago. Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers were my main inspiration in adapting the style. Machaut a Go-go was written in 1991 for Kitty Brazelton and her nine-piece band, Dadadah. Kitty made the translation and adaptation of the Machaut lyrics, as well as helping immeasurably to shape the piece. Many thanks to her and the other members of Dadadah for their work and musicianship.
Machaut a Go-go can be performed with an introduction: a performance of the original virelais (for voice and harp or guitar) that is rudely interrupted by the drummer, who leads in the other musicians. Here is a copy of the Machaut to use if you want to do this introduction.
Machaut a Go-go is part of my ongoing project, A Book of Days . You can listen to a Dadadah's recording by visiting May 7th.
You can download a score of the piece here. You can purchase performance materials by clicking the link below. You are welcome to arrange the piece for different ensembles; the piece is flexible that way, for sure!
Thanks for supporting this low-key way of publishing!
Instrumentation: saxophone horn trombone percussion (unpitched) harp guitar voice (singer) cello bass
Ensemble Size: 7-12
Project(s): A Book of Days Machaut in the Machine Age
Play Like a Girl
Play Like a Girl was commissioned for the BASK Collective by the University of Idaho for a multimedia project in which the keyboard player, Kristin Elgersma, asked for the possibility of playing either grand piano or toy piano, or both, depending on performance constraints. My solution was to write a set of eight variations on Kaval Sviri, one of those Bulgarian Women's Chorus pieces that were a surprise hit in the late 1980's. If their ferociously joyous singing is girl music, I'm there! Some of my variations are for grand piano, some for toy piano, and some for celeste or harpsichord or other "girly" instruments, I'm open for you to arrange and adapt as you like. The variations can be played in any combination, simultaneously (with pre-recorded tracks) or successively, allowing for a total of eight factorial (40,320) versions of the piece.
After I completed the piece, I learned that the same song had been adapted as the theme music for the late 90s cult classic TV show Xena: Warrior Princess. Now that I've checked out the show, I'm definitely enjoying picturing Lucy Lawless in full battle garb playing the toy piano like the girl she is.
Here is a link to the Bulgarian State Women's Chorus performance of the arrangement that inspired my piece:
Here is a score of the complete piece in pdf format.
Play Like a Girl is part of my ongoing project, A Book of Days, where I post a different version of the piece on the 13th of each month. I've also made a downloadable streamable playlist of various demos and live performances, check it out!
I normally charge $50 for the performing materials for this piece, but I've made it pay-as-you-like for the duration of the pandemic. When you click the Buy Now button below and pay whatever you choose (including nothing), you'll get a link to download all eight individual scores and recordings, along with various arrangements I've made, which will give you the materials you need to make your own version of the piece. If you'd like an Ableton Live session with my MIDI and pre-recorded tracks already set up for karaoke-style playback and re-mixing, I can send you that also.
You can also read a short take on "being a girl" in the second paragraph of this blog post from The River Project.
Instrumentation: percussion (pitched) harp piano harpsichord organ synthesizer guitar open instrumentation
Duration: <5 minutes 5-12 minutes
Electronics: No Electronics Fixed Audio Live Processing
Project(s): A Book of Days BRIM: The River Project


As an educator, artist, former banker, human services administrator, writer, storyteller, and public speaker on Folk Art and Culture, Eunice LaFate has positively impacted the lives of many. A Jamaican born self-taught artist, Eunice's vibrant art in acrylic, oil and watercolors portrays folk culture and embraces human diversity.
Through her many career endeavors, LaFate has experienced the profound transforming power of the Arts, starting with her "safe-haven basement gallery" for youth on the Wilmington's Eastside in the '1990s. She also worked with the YWCA Studies Circles program to address racism, the YMCA Youth Achievers program, the Summer Stop the Violence program, Project Stay Free, Job Corps, and more recently, Summer Arts in the Parks.
In 2013, LaFate celebrated a 20-Year Folk Art Retrospective with a 3-month Exhibition at the Blue Ball Barn, and the production of a Documentary, "Arts as Prevention. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and citations, her most recent the 2014 Governor's Award for the Arts. Additionall she has received numerous awards for her folk art and community volunteerism. In retirement, LaFate continues to be actively involved in engaging Inner City youth in the Arts. Her paintings are in the art collection of Delaware Folk Life of the Blue Ball Barn and in the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library in Little, Rock AR.
LaFate earned a BA degree from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica and a MS degree in Human Services Administration, graduating magna cumlade, from Springfield College, MA.
"The Artist envisions a world where no child is left behind, because "Every Child is a Star."