Chapter 4 explores methods for turning model variance inside out. We discuss the logic and limitations of decomposing variance to the level of cases and introduce two distinct approaches to obtaining case-level contributions to the model variance: the squared residuals approach and the leave-one-out approach.

This chapter discusses attempts to estimate the effects and causes of corruption. Results obtained using the linear regression models have suggested a list of determinants, and of effects, of corruption. They also have implicitly promoted a view according to which we read the observed associations between corruption and other factors in causal terms. This chapter proposes a critical assessment of whether the counterfactual of a significantly different level of corruption from the one observed may be legitimate. From this discussion, corruption emerges as a part of a “dense historical matrix,” one where it is difficult to contemplate changes in individual factors while leaving others unmodified.

Alarming decreases in cotton production have been reported over the last three decades due to neoliberal agrarian policies, agribusiness and shrinking areas of cultivatable land, among other factors. These changes underline the importance of creating an archive of knowledge about the production of cotton. Its history, the role of the state and the forms of hierarchical and exploitative divisions of labour need to be reconstructed and recalled as an exercise in nurturing the collective memory, for they are currently suffering a pervasive process of memory erasure by the powers that be. This short chapter is, in a way, an appendix to my book The Cotton Plantation Remembered (2013). It focuses on some ten documents derived from account books of the Fuuda family’s ‘izba located in Balamun in the Nile Delta, which accumulated wealth by acquiring massive tracts of agricultural land during the second half of the nineteenth century. This chapter is an attempt at attesting and reviving the significance of these account books for an alternative historical reading of such estates, as well as for rethinking what constitutes an archive.

This chapter outlines the methodological background of this study. It argues that the main tendencies in the existing scholarship on Frankish Jerusalem are rooted in the types of sources that were hitherto primarily used and the approaches that were implemented in the examination of these sources. This chapter places the current study within a broader methodological and theoretical framework, providing an overview of recent developments in the study of medieval urban environments. It especially focuses on the conversion of medieval textual sources into quantifiable data and argues that with proper modifications, such methods can be applied to the case of Frankish Jerusalem. Finally, this chapter introduces the database that forms the basis of this study.

This chapter rounds off the book by recapitulating the argument that the research program of modern Generative Grammar has provided profound insights into the structure of the faculty of language (FL) to explain both linguistic creativity and linguistic flexibility. The proposal is that the Generative enterprise has allowed us to examine what kinds of recursive procedures natural language grammars contain, and to understand key aspects of the fine structure of FL. The Minimalist Program then asks the obvious next question of why FL has the particular structure Generativists discovered it to have. It is argued that the central Minimalist thesis, the Merge Hypothesis (MH), explains how linguistic creativity is the product of a very simple combinatoric operation (i.e. Merge), and then showed how the MH can be extended (into the EMH) by the addition of labels to cover most of the generalizations discovered in the past sixty years of Generative research.

A recent study in Neurology provides the best data yet on the effect of long-term, chronic laxative use on risk of getting dementia. In this 10-year study of 502,229 UK Biobank participants, the regular use of laxatives was associated with a higher risk of all-cause and vascular dementia. At the start of the study, the average age was 57 years, and none of the participants had dementia. Over the subsequent 10 years, 1.3% of those who regularly used laxatives developed dementia. Regular use was defined as taken almost every day. Only 0.4% of those not regularly using laxatives developed dementia. After adjusting for factors such as age, sex, education, other illnesses, and medication use, participants who regularly used laxatives were 1.51 times more likely to develop dementia compared to people who did not regularly use laxatives (hazard ratio = 1.51).

This chapter begins with the way in which Oceania was first populated by successive waves of migration beginning around 50,000 to 45,000 years ago, noting that studies of the early period often deploy the geographic terms ‘Near Oceania’ and ‘Remote Oceania’ that have no ethnic or cultural connotations as some later naming practices do. It goes on to examines the demarcation of Oceania, or the various parts of it, by European explorers. The most controversial exercise in naming is undoubtedly the tripartite division of the Island Pacific devised by eighteenth-century Europeans, namely, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. The distinctions between these subregional entities arose in a context in which racialist ideas were prominent and that therefore bear their imprint. The tripartite division receives special attention in this chapter due not only to the scholarly critiques surrounding it but also because of the extent to which it underpins contemporary subregional developments.

This chapter juxtaposes Plato’s Cave Allegory and our visual media. Plato’s detailed text, in which Socrates describes the projection of shadows onto a wall by means of firelight, readily lends itself to a cinematic understanding. Various film theorists, directors, and cinematographers have pointed to this analogy for their own approaches to cinema. Henri Bergson was the first to incorporate the Cave Allegory into his philosophy of the cinematographic mind. The chapter traces such a development from the birth of cinema until today, e.g. in texts by Maxim Gorky, Susan Sontag, and others. Specific films, such as Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, address the Platonic symbolism of light and shadow as stages of knowledge or enlightenment. Related to this topic is the power of moving images (e.g. in A Clockwork Orange), the question of their truth or reliability (documentaries, “fake news”), and their relation to historical memory (Agnès Varda, Marcel Ophuls).

Chapter 14 explores Ilf and Petrov’s complicated relationship with American food. By 1935, Soviet promises of plenty were everywhere, but even staple goods remained in short supply. In the United States, the authors found that food was plentiful, efficiently produced and distributed, often attractive to the eye. But they did not rave about American food as they did about American highways, claiming (not always convincingly) that it was tasteless and monotonous. The writers explained this situation as a product not only of capitalism, which put profits ahead of flavor or variety, but of (white) Americans’ inability to appreciate good food.