Publications of et al

Albertus the Naturalist in Judah Romano's Hebrew Translations

This chapter relates to core issues of Judah's philosophic and literary interests. Philosophical translation from Latin into Hebrew was admittedly an uncommon feature of medieval Jewish intellectual history, but this cross-cultural endeavor was practiced with enthusiasm by its few devotees. Judah's surviving work consists of translations into Hebrew, but it can be seen as a response to these rare opportunities of Jewish-Christian philosophical interaction. This chapter concentrates on the translations from De forma, De anima, and De spiritu that form the object of the author's publication project. It looks at the linguistic evidence and then returns to the question of their subject matter, thus distributing the author's remarks, in Aristotelian terms, equally between the techne and the episteme. According to Albert, pneuma, "the form of life", is the tool by which the soul guides the different functions of the body: esse, vivere, sentire, moveri, intelligere.

Final Report for the Assessment of the 6th Environmental Action Programme

This report presents the results of the independent evaluation of the 6EAP. The overall objective of this evaluation was to provide an in-depth assessment of the achievements of the 6EAP since its adoption in 2002 to the end of 2010. The assessment is based on two primary sources. One is desk research to analyse relevant EU policies, measures and tools adopted since 2002 and their contribution to objectives set out in the 6EAP. The other is a series of targeted consultations with key European stakeholders through an electronic survey, three expert workshops and several interviews with relevant policy-makers in the European institutions and stakeholders, which explored the overall added value of the 6EAP.

The role of effects for infants' perception of action goals.

Recent studies have demonstrated that 6-month-olds perceive manual actions as object-directed (Woodward, 1999) — and that 8-, but not 6-month-olds, apply this interpretation even to unfamiliar actions if these produce salient object-directed effects (Kiràly, Jovanovic, Prinz, Aschersleben, & Gergely, 2003). The present study had two objectives. First, we tested the alternative interpretation that action effects result in a general increase of attention by testing infants with an analogous paradigm, including however a non-human agent. Second, we investigated in how far the negative findings for the 6-month-olds reported in the study by Kiràly et al. (2003) might be due to the familiarity of the action or the discriminability of the objects involved. The results indicate that adding effects to both a familiar and an unfamiliar action leads even 6-month-olds to interpret the respective action as object-directed, given that the objects are well discriminable. However, infants do not apply such an interpretation to actions of a non-human agent.

Environmental History in Europe from 1994 to 2004 : Enthusiasm and Consolidation

This review presents European scholarship in environmental history by highlighting a limited number of works which have proved significant in their respective countries. The decade from 1994-2004 saw the development of a new scholarly network for environmental history in Europe. Members of this network have contributed to an overview about important work done in their region during the last ten years. A series of case studies on Great Britain, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, France, Italy, Spain and Czechia and Slovakia are ordered. The emerging picture shows the diversity of approaches and themes as well as the different degrees of institutional backing and involvement into teaching curricula. The introduction discusses the language challenges in Europe and some common traits in the development are sketched in the conclusions.

Monthly mean pressure reconstruction for the Late Maunder Minimum period (AD 1675-1715)

The Late Maunder Minimum(LMM; 1675-1715) delineates a period with marked climate variability within the Little Ice Age in Europe. Gridded monthly mean surface pressure fields were reconstructed for this period for the eastern North Atlantic-European region (25 degrees W-30 degrees E and 35-70 degrees N). These were based on continuous information drawn from proxy and instrumental data taken from several European data sites. The data include indexed temperature and rainfall values, sea ice conditions from northern Iceland and the Western Baltic. In addition, limited instrumental data, such as air temperature from central England (CET) and Paris, reduced mean sea level pressure (SLP) at Paris, and monthly mean wind direction in the Oresund (Denmark) are used. The reconstructions are based on a canonical correlation analysis (CCA), with the standardized station data as predictors and the SLP pressure fields as predictand. The CCA-based model was performed using data from the twentieth century. The period 1901-1960 was used to calibrate the statistical model, and the remaining 30 years (1961-1990) for the validation of the reconstructed monthly pressure fields. Assuming stationarity of the statistical relationships, the calibrated CCA model was then used to predict the monthly LMM SLP fields. The verification results illustrated that the regression equations developed for the majority of grid points contain good predictive skill. Nevertheless, there are seasonal and geographical limitations for which valid spatial SLP patterns can be reconstructed. Backward elimination techniques indicated that Paris station air pressure and temperature, GET, and the wind direction in the Oresund are the most important predictors, together sharing more than 65% of the total variance. The reconstructions are compared with additional data and subjectively reconstructed monthly pressure charts for the years 1675-1704. It is shown that there are differences between the two approaches. However, for extreme years the reconstructions are in good agreement. Copyright (C) 2000 Royal Meteorological Society.

Documentary Evidence on Climate in Sixteenth-Century Europe

The known documentary climatic evidence from six European countries – Switzerland, Germany, the Czech Republic, ancient Hungary, Italy and Spain – is presented and classified in this article and then further analyzed in subsequent papers included in this volume. The sixteenth century witnessed an increase in the number and variety of sources in Switzerland, Germany and the Czech Republic as well as in the western and northern parts of ancient Hungary (present Slovakia). In northern Italy, the relevant sources are more abundant and widespread than in central Europe, but they have hardly been explored. Town chronicles written by members of the literate elite comprise the basic type of evidence in central Europe (including northern Italy and Hungary). This kind of source reports exceptional climatic events (e.g. anomalies and natural disasters) along with their impact on the environment and on society. Documentary data are the only evidence known to exist for reconstructing time series of natural disasters prior to the twentieth century. In order to document the extreme character of an event, chroniclers frequently referred to features in the cryosphere, biosphere or hydrosphere that were known to be more accurate yardsticks of temperature and precipitation patterns than subjective impressions. When records of such events are compiled with the description of some of the known effects, the results can be transformed into a severity index. Whereas chroniclers usually focused upon extreme events, long, continuous and seemingly homogeneous series of different kinds of proxy data are drawn from administrative records. Most of them are connected to the timing of certain kinds of agricultural work (hay-making, beginning of grain harvest or vintage) or to the amount and quality of agricultural production (per hectare yield of vineyards, sugar content of wine, etc.). In most cases the timing of these works was found to be directly related to temperature patterns over the preceding months and weeks.All the Iberian peninsula towns, which had an institutionalized municipal authority, have preserved documents generated from the late Middle Ages. These records frequently contain references to floods and meteorological anomalies such as droughts and long wet spells. They also include mention of the system of rogations, those religious rites performed in a standardized way within the Spanish world with a view to putting an end to an alleged meteorological stress.The data for Switzerland, Hungary and Spain as well as much of the data for Germany are stored in the EURO-CLIMHIST database set up at the Institute of History at the University of Bern. At present, EURO-CLIMHIST comprises some 600,000 data for the period from AD 750 to the beginning of the period of instrumental networks. About 120,000 records for Germany are currently stored in a data bank called HISKLID located at the Department of Geography of the University of Würzburg. The database for the Czech Republic includes records for the time-span AD 975-1900 and is housed with the Department of Geography of Masaryk University in Brno. Data on Italy were collected with different purposes and are stored in two data banks, the CNR-ICTIMA (climatic data and natural disasters) and the SGA (extreme events).

With contributions from Carla Kruger et al. Privatization Reports, vol. 3. Budapest

Presents an up-to-date and comprehensive picture of the transformation of the retail trade and consumer service sectors in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Provides background on the operation of the sector prior to the demise of the communist regime in the Czech Republic, where the purest form of the command system had been in effect; describes the departures from this system in Hungary and Poland and the effects of communist reform efforts in the Hungarian and Polish retail trade and consumer service sectors; and explains the particulars of the privatization programs implemented in each country in the immediate postcommunist period. Analyzes the results of a survey of three hundred shops, restaurants, and service establishments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to assess the performance of the privatized trade and service establishments in each country and identify the main driving forces of successful privatization. Coauthors are Roman Frydman, Andrzej Rapaczynski, and Joel Turkewitz. Earle teaches economics at Stanford University and the Central European University in Prague. No index.