Academic literature on the topic 'Man born after his time'

P ope Francis is a man who all his life has lived his faith,  questions and all.   For many people,  Catholics and otherwise, who Francis is, and what he stands for as a person, is perhaps epitomised in a single  statement: “Who am I to judge?”   That remark has also  generated a backlash, both inside the Church and outside.  Moral relativism is, and always has been,  a bugbear for established religion. If Francis is to be judged  guilty on this count, then he could probably find solace in the thought that he would be in the same boat as Jesus, who when challenged by a clear and unequivocal  statement of law, countered with an ad hominem answer – “Let him who is without sin throw the first stone!”  The Catholic Church, through  the centuries,  has tried to deal with the ambiva- lence in applying absolute standards to  specific actions and  people, and the distinction between dogmatic and pastoral theology is of good standing. What is new perhaps, is that the Pope himself has  given a clear and unequivocal priority to mercy. 

Wiesław Krzemiński was born on 26 October 1948, in Oświęcim, south of Poland. In his youth he was an addicted book reader and developed his love for nature. After few years of playing in a big beat band he eventually focused on biology. Currently, he is a full time Professor and works in the Institute of Systematics and Evolution Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków (ISEA PAS) and the Pedagogical University in Kraków.

Kim Sin-rak(November 14th, 1924- October 28th, 1963), better known as Rikidozan, is one of the most decorated professional wrestlers of all time. Born in the Northern part of Korea, he immigrated to Japan to become a sumo wrestler. Though he had some success in the world of sumo wrestling, his dispute with his stable master would lead to Rikidozan retiring from the sport to become a black marketeer and construction worker. His life would change after being recruited by American professional wrestler and promoter Bobby Bruns to come along on a wrestling tour of Japan. After this first tour was done, he left for the United States where his fame and popularity steadily grew. He was soon established as Japan's biggest professional wrestling star, defeating the imposing American wrestlers through sheer strength, tenacity, and sumo-based chops. At the time of Rikidozan's rise to superstardom, Japan was left reeling after surrendering to the United States in 1945. The Japanese people needed a hero, and Rikidozan became that hero. Millions of Japanese citizens crowded television screens in order to watch Rikidozan fight off American wrestlers, giving hope to a downtrodden nation. Rikidozan's storied career would leave behind a major impact on Japan, becoming the first postwar hero who embraced Japanese ideals. His foundation of the Japan Pro Wrestling Alliance in 1953 was the starting point for the establishment of puroresu, or Japanese pro wrestling. His JWA paved the way for companies like New Japan Pro Wrestling to become both a domestic and worldwide phenomenon. Japan was not the only country to have idolized Rikidozan as a national hero, however. Years after Rikidozan's death, North Korea claimed Rikidozan as their own national hero. Though Rikidozan lived life as a Japanese star, he was born as Kim Sin-rak, an ethnic North Korean. North Korea published multiple pieces of state propaganda re-writing the narrative of Rikidozan's career to fit the views of North Korea, to inspire their citizens to follow state teachings. Rikidozan was repackaged into a North Korean patriot who hated Japan and loved his home country, and had fought and dedicated his matches to the Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung. He did not simply defeat wrestlers, he had fought off almost mythical beings in American and Japanese wrestlers and became the symbol of strength and resillience in North Korea.This essay seeks to examine both of the differing stories told about Rikidozan's career, and contextualize them with their respective time period. Rikidozan's career in the Japanese telling is post-World War 2, while the North Korean telling lines up more accurately with the later half of the Cold War. Rikidozan's career is examined with an understanding of the ins and outs of professional wrestling and historical context behind the concurrent events during Rikidozan's career and the North Korean re-telling of that career.

The process of depriving Catholic martyrs of their lives inevitably involved the lay authorities in some expense. This is borne out graphically by the Newcastle Chamberlains’ Accounts of the early 1590s, which relate to the sufferings of Joseph Lambton and Edward Waterson, who were executed at Newcastle, and John Ingram, who died across the river in Gateshead. The details of their torments are well established. Lambton—who was born in May 1568 and was probably the youngest of all the martyrs—and Waterson were captured at Newcastle at about the same time and condemned to death at the assizes held on 20 July 1592. The execution, which was set for Saturday 22 July, was postponed until the Monday ‘in order to avoid a crowd of people’. In the event Lambton suffered alone and his execution ‘was one of the most horrible on record’. The task of hanging and dismembering Lambton's body was given to a man condemned for felony at the same assizes: he was offered a reprieve in exchange for performing the gruesome duty. The job was badly botched and a French surgeon was called in and paid twenty shillings to complete it. Waterson was given a temporary reprieve. It is recorded that the sheriff took one of the quarters of Lambton's body to Waterson ‘hoping to frighten him into submission but Waterson only kissed it’. Indeed, Waterson was made of stern stuff. His date of birth is not known but he was born in London and brought up a protestant. After travelling in Turkey he was ordained at Rheims in March 1592 and sent to England two months later. After his reprieve in July 1592 Waterson escaped but was soon recaptured. He refused to be cowed and languish quietly in his cell: the Newcastle chamberlains had to lay out money to repair ‘the door that the priest burnt in prison’. He was executed on 8 January 1593 by John Litherington, a fellow prisoner, although the grisly task of quartering the body fell to the serjeant, William Fever.

Professor Michael Levitt (Stanford University, USA) won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems—computational tools which can calculate the course of chemical reactions. Professor Levitt was born in Pretoria, South Africa; he came to the UK on a summer vacation aged 16, where he decided to stay and study for his A‑levels. His interest in the physics of living systems drove him to study biophysics at King’s College London, before securing a PhD position at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. In the interim year between his degree and beginning his PhD, Professor Levitt worked at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where he met his future wife. They married later that year and moved to Cambridge, where their three children were born. After completing his PhD, he spent time working in Israel, Cambridge, the Salk Institute and Stanford (both California). Since 1986, he has split his time between Israel and California. Outside of science, he is a keen hiker and he is well-known to have attended the eclectic ‘Burning Man’ Festival in California.[1]Professor Levitt visited the University of Warwick to speak at the Computational Molecular Science Annual Conference in March 2015. In this interview, Dr Gemma-Louise Davies, an Institute of Advanced Study Global Research Fellow, spoke to Professor Levitt about the importance of Interdisciplinarity in his field, role models in Academia, and his plans for the future.Image: Professor Michael Levitt (left) with Dr Scott Habershon (right, organiser of the 2015 Computational Molecular Science Annual Conference) during his visit to the University of Warwick in March 2015.[1] ‘Burning Man’ is a unique annual festival dedicated to community, art, music, self-expression and self-reliance. Tens of thousands of people flock to this temporary metropolis built in the Californian desert.

The article introduces Alexander Kuchin and his “Small Russian-Norwegian dictionary”, which was published in 1907 by the publishing house “Pomor” (Finnmarken) in Vardø (Norway) and was very popular at that time. Its author, Alexander Stepanovich Kuchin, a man with a unique destiny, is known to compatriots as the only Russian who participated in the discovery of the South Pole in the Roald Amundsen’s expedition, and also as the first of our countrymen who, after the discovery of Antarctica in 1820 by the expedition of Faddey F. Bellingshausen and Michael P. Lazarev, landed on the coast of the Southern continent. A talented young man who died in the expedition of Vladimir A. Rusanov at the age of only 25, made a great contribution to science, research and navigation. Born in the village of Kushereka in the Onega district of the Arkhangelsk province, Alexander received a good education for that time. He graduated from a two-grade parochial school in Kushereka, brilliantly studied at the Onega City School, attended classes at the Tromsø school for a year and was the only one in the course graduated from the Arkhangelsk Merchant and Maritime School with a gold medal. He read H. Ibsen, K. Hamsun, J. Falkberget and other writers in the original. Alexander was also lucky to work at the biological station in Bergen under the direction of Bjørn Hjelland-Hansen, one of the founders of oceanography as a science; here he also met Fridtjof Nansen, one of the national Norwegian heroes, which played a significant role in A. Kuchin’s life. The “Small Russian-Norwegian dictionary” was published in 2,000 copies and was very popular that time. The dictionary contains around 4,000 words on 48 pages. There are no proper names in it, but at the end of the dictionary basic information about the phonetics and grammar of the Norwegian language is disposed. It is focused on Russian users and arouses undoubted interest among linguists, since it appeared in 1907, two years after the termination of the union with Sweden. It is valuable that Alexander Kuchin, not being a linguist, fixed the language used by common people such as fishermen and trawlermen in the North of Norway (particularly in Finnmark and Troms). Such a democratic version of the language is also of special scientific interest. In general, the dictionary was caused by necessity, appeared at a proper time, was well compiled and completely fulfilled the functions assigned to it.

George Frideric Handel was born in Halle (Saale) in Germany. After initial musical education in Germany and Italy, he came to London as a young man and spent the rest of his life in England. Until recently, little has been written of his early life in either the English or the German literature, and it is not widely known that he was the son of Georg Händel, a barber-surgeon of repute. When his father's name is mentioned, it is usually to claim that he actively discouraged his son's musical education. Georg Händel lived in a turbulent time; he became an eminent surgeon who served as valet and barber to the Courts of Saxony and Brandenburg, as well as a distinguished citizen of Halle. In describing his surgical duties, we show how these differed from those of barbers in England and France at that time. Barbers in Germany were less controlled, freer to practise as they pleased, and Händel himself had important duties in public health and forensic medicine. George Frideric was the first son of the second marriage, born when his father was 63 years of age. We aim also to dispel the notion that Händel's influence on his son's career was as obstructive as has been claimed, but rather that he was a responsible father with his children's interests at heart. This is shown in the success achieved by all his children, most of whom followed their father into medicine, while George Frideric became the most famous of them all, being regarded by posterity as one of the greatest composers.

The Constitutional Court of Korea declared in the decision of 2021 HunMa975 on March 23, 2023 that the unconstitutionality of Articles 46(2) and 57(1) and (2) of the Family Relationship Registration Act for infringing upon the constitutional right to be registered at birth for illegitimate children born to married women, ordering the legislature to enact remedial legislation by May 31, 2025. This paper proposes a scientific method for determining paternity, whereby a biological father can prove paternity through a test conducted by an agency certified by the Minister of Justice before the child’s birth. In such cases, the presumption of paternity can be immediately rebutted, allowing the biological father to register the child as his own. The paper also suggests that after the child’s birth as a child of his mother’s husband, a biological father can bring an action to deny of paternity in condition that he can demonstrate that his wife could not have conceived a child with her husband due to a long-term separation at the time of conception and if he becomes aware of this fact within two years of the child’s birth. This proposal seeks to strike a balance between the principles of bloodline truth and the child’s welfare.

People with surgically removed congenital dense bilateral cataracts offer a natural model of visual deprivation and reafferentation in humans to investigate sensitive periods of multisensory development, for example regarding the recruitment of external or anatomical frames of reference for spatial representation. Here we present a single case (HS; male; 33 years; right-handed), born with congenital dense bilateral cataracts. His lenses were removed at the age of two years, but he received optical aids only at age six. At time of testing, his visual acuity was 30% in the best eye. We performed two tasks, a tactile temporal order judgment task (TOJ) in which two tactile stimuli were presented successively to the index fingers located in the two hemifields, adopting a crossed and uncrossed hand posture. The participant judged as precisely as possible which side was stimulated first. Moreover, we used a crossmodal-congruency task in which a tactile stimulus and an irrelevant visual distracter were presented simultaneously but independently to one of four positions. The participant judged the location (index or thumb) of the tactile stimulus with hands crossed or uncrossed. Speed was emphasized. In contrast to sighted controls, HS did not show a decrement of TOJ performance with hands crossed. Moreover, while the congruency gain was equivalent to sighted controls with uncrossed hands, this effect was significantly reduced with hands crossed. Thus, an external remapping of tactile stimuli still develops after a long phase of visual deprivation. However, remapping seems to be less efficient and to only take place in the context of visual stimuli.

This article aimed to give an opinion about the person of Jesus Christ, seeking to clarify, according to the Holy Scriptures and opinions of scholars of the Holy Scriptures, whether Jesus was uniquely human, uniquely divine or human and divine at the same time. Therefore, the following aspects were addressed: the humanity of Jesus; Jesus a perfect man; the divinity of Jesus; Jesus and the Doctrine of the Trinity; and, solution to biblical incongruities of the Trinity. After analyzing the biblical texts and the positions of some scholars of the Holy Scriptures, it is possible to conclude that Jesus, as a man, was equal to all mortals, and, as God, was the Word made flesh, emptying himself of His glory (of His incommunicable attributes), in order to be able to be born, grow, live and die for sinners (without committing any sin), coming to be resurrected by the power of God, which brought him back to life.

"This book is the fruit of "excavations" carried out in memory of Prof. Corrado Corghi between 2004 and 2005. At the time Corghi was a member of the Presiding Council of the Istituto degli Innocenti of Florence. When the meetings of the Council were held, Corghi came down from Reggio Emilia to Florence, and in the evenings he was frequently my guest at dinner. These meetings enabled me to enjoy extensive tracking shots of the past, thanks to the extraordinary lucidity of a man born in 1920 who had devoted most of his life to politics. On the basis of our lengthy discussions I was able to revoke people and events from Fascism to the Resistance, from the times of Democrazia Cristiana to the funerals of the "victims of Reggio Emilia" (1960), through to the Vatican Council and the season of '68. These talks of ours gave rise to singular documents of the life and social history of the Italians. With this volume, the historic-social Archive on contemporary religion of San Gimignano presents itself with its distinctive features to the broad public and to researchers." (A. Nesti)

al-Naḫl yamūtu wāqifan (Palm Trees Wither Upright) is the first work by Tunisian writer Ibrāhīm Darġūṯī, born in El-Mahassen (Tozeur) in 1955, proponent of the experimentalism and magical realism, and known all over the Arab world for his pungent writing style. The work was published in Sfax in 1989, and is a collection of short stories devoted to the local life of al-Ǧarīd region, in southern Tunisia; to its traditions, distinctive traits and, at times, to imagination, creating a unique mixture, which is representative of Darġūṯī’s literature. Men, the desert, and palm trees are the essential elements, the three primary colours of this literary text. Stories unfold around this triad and through them its author introduces the many facets of local reality. “A hand full of sun for ʿAzīz” or “Lion’s paw” reveal an intimate relationship between nature, represented by the palm grove, and the inhabitants of that land; a sort of tacit agreement for which one has promised to take care of the other since the dawn of time. Other stories explore all the repressive elements of the system: class differences, hunger, humiliation, tyranny; in short, the loss of fundamental rights. In this sense, Darġūṯī’s work is not remission or defenceless immobility in the face of the injustices perpetrated by man on his neighbour; on the contrary, it is pure rebellion. al-Naḫl is a vivid mixture in which multiple traditions blend. It is a set of fragments of an Arab, Tunisian or Saharan setting fairy tale, or of the Islamic cultural heritage. It shows the scars left by French colonialism, or the challenge of man facing the change of times. It is a condemnation of all kinds of injustice, a cry of anguish and restlessness for the troubles of everyday life. It is a glimpse of the Ǧarīd with its mysteries, the desert that claims men’s lives, the almost metaphysical landscapes of a salt lake that was once a sea. It is the first work by Darġūṯī translated into Italian.

Sam Aleckson was the pen name for Samuel Williams, a man born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote a memoir about his life and the world around him during and after his bondage. It is published here for the first time under his own name and with biographical and interpretive context. Published privately by his family, Before the War and After the Union traces Williams’s life from his earliest memories of being enslaved and forced to serve Confederate soliders in army camps, through the post–Civil War years as his family struggled to reconnect and build a new life during Reconstruction. It the ends with tales about his life as the head of a Southern Black family newly relocated to Vermont at the turn-of-the-century. When he wrote his memoir nearly sixty years after emancipation, Williams was an elderly man, far from the site of his childhood in South Carolina, but his memories and analysis were keen and veer from occasional fraught nostalgia to sharply bitter analysis, creating a fascinating American story of suffering and transcendence.

Bruce Springsteen’s career has been covered many times over, yet many of the complexities and apparent contradictions of his music remain unresolved. Rob Kirkpatrick provides a comprehensive and coherent look at the work of this thoroughly complex and persistently captivating artist. After a brief biographical treatment, Kirkpatrick considers all of Springsteen’s significant albums in chronological order. These include Born to Run, which was voted the most popular album of all time in a recently published Zagat survey; Born in the U.S.A., which sold more than 20 million copies; and The Rising, regarded by many as the most poignant artistic reaction to 9/11. In addition to a probing musical analysis, the book offers a guide to Springsteen’s lyrical themes and motifs, allowing readers insight into the complicated nature of the artist’s underlying concerns, influences, and ideas. Rounding out the volume is a consideration of The Boss’s legacy as a songwriter and musician, as well as appendices including a bibliography and a complete discography. The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen provides a comprehensive and coherent look at the work of a thoroughly complex and persistently captivating artist. Springsteen enjoys a popularity that has transcended generations. His 1975 album Born to Run was voted the most popular album of all time in a recently published Zagat survey; his 1984 album Born in the U.S.A. spawned seven Top Ten singles while selling more than 20 million copies; and his 2002 album The Rising was regarded by many critics as the most poignant artistic reaction to 9/11. Springsteen, now in his 50s, has evolved from an over-hyped version of the next Bob Dylan, to the future of rock and roll in the mid-1970s, to a pop culture icon in Reagan America, to a 21st-century populist voice. His career has been covered many times over, yet many of the complexities and apparent contradictions of his music remain unresolved. These include his hard-rock influenced musical background; his movement from themes of rebellion and isolation in his early work to those of a more populist complexion later on; and his contribution in the 1980s to a conservative patriotism—despite his albums’ close association with the music and ideas of Woody Guthrie. After a brief biographical treatment, Kirkpatrick considers all of Springsteen’s significant albums in chronological order. In addition to this probing musical analysis, he offers a guide to Springsteen’s lyrical themes and motifs, allowing readers a coherent insight into the complicated nature of the artist’s underlying concerns, influences, and ideas. Rounding out the volume is a consideration of The Boss’s legacy as a songwriter and musician, as well as appendices including a bibliography and a complete discography. In sum, The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen provides a comprehensive and coherent look, previously unavailable in a single volume, at the work of a thoroughly complex and persistently captivating artist.

This is the first complete biography of Ernst Kantorowicz (1895–1963), an influential and controversial German– American intellectual whose colorful and dramatic life intersected with many of the great events and thinkers of his time. Born into a wealthy Prussian-Jewish family, Kantorowicz fought on the Western Front in World War I, was wounded at Verdun, and earned an Iron Cross. Later, he earned an Iron Crescent for service in Anatolia before an affair with a general's mistress led to Kantorowicz being sent home. After the war, he fought against Poles in his native Posen, Spartacists in Berlin, and communists in Munich. An ardent German nationalist during the Weimar period, Kantorowicz became a member of the elitist Stefan George circle, which nurtured a cult of the “Secret Germany”. Yet as a professor in Frankfurt after the Nazis came to power, Kantorowicz bravely spoke out against the regime before an overflowing crowd. Narrowly avoiding arrest after Kristallnacht, he fled to England and then the United States, where he joined the faculty at Berkeley, only to be fired in 1950 for refusing to sign an anticommunist “loyalty oath.” From there, he “fell up the ladder” to Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where he stayed until his death. Drawing on many new sources, including numerous interviews and unpublished letters, this book tells the story of a major intellectual whose life and times were as fascinating as his work.

Thanks to his part in the rediscovery of Lucretius in the Renaissance Poggio Bracciolini has been much in academic news recently. But he was always there as a part of the histories of that moment, in all its twists and turns, as an example of what it was to be a Renaissance humanist in the earlier part of the XVth century. He was born in 1380 and educated first in Arezzo. But he soon moved to Florence to become a notary and from his intellectual contacts there a little after 1403 he became a member of the entourage of Pope Benedict IX to remain all his life a member of the Papal court. But, in true humanist fashion, he was busy always with his writings, taking on a range of general subjects, nobility, the vicissitudes of Fortune and many others. Also, again in true humanist fashion, he was often involved in dispute with other scholars, most notably Lorenzo Valla. Yet, amidst all this activity, he had time to travel throughout Europe, scouring libraries to uncover, as with Lucretius, long neglected texts. But perhaps his most notable achievement was the design of a new script, moving away from the less legible texts of medieval copyists to provide one, far easier to read, that was to become the model in Italy for the first printed books – as it is a model still for publishers. Few scholars of that moment can claim to have had so profound and persistent an influence on the spread of culture in Europe and beyond.

This chapter examines Volkhovskii’s early life from his birth in 1846 down to his third arrest in 1874. Volkhovskii was born into a comparatively impoverished noble family in modern-day Ukraine. He was at a young age scarred by seeing the harsh treatment of the serfs on his grandfather’s estate, which prompted his sympathy for the plight of the Russian people, and he was while still a teenager already well-versed in the ideas expressed in radical literature (both legal and illegal). He initially came under police supervision in 1866, in part because of his role in running a student organisation suspected of fostering Ukrainian national sentiment, before being arrested two years later for his part in setting up the Ruble Society that sought to build closer links between the intelligentsia and the peasantry. Volkhovskii was eventually released without charge, but within a few months he was arrested again, in part because he was suspected of having ties to Sergei Nechaev, the enfant terrible of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary movement, whose sadism and penchant for melodramatic pronouncements alienated many of his fellow revolutionaries. Volkhovskii was again acquitted, after two years in prison, subsequently moving south to Odessa where he established one of the most active groups that made up the Chaikovskii movement. Volkhovskii’s group was extremely well-organised, insisting on the complete commitment of its members, and directed much of its attention to agitation among urban workers rather than the peasantry. Volkhovskii believed for a short time in the late 1860s that a successful revolution could be brought about by a small group committed to seizing power to bring about social and economic revolution. He was, though, for the most part convinced that real change would only come about through a programme of agitation designed to foment a radical outlook among the Russian narod.

This paper argues that the aporia at the heart of Derrida’s essay on hospitality — its absence, its transgressions, its digressions – perfectly describes the narrative landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road. Following Derrida along McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic road allows the reader to explore the impossible hospitality of a world in which a man and his son must travel without the comforts of home or the safety of houses. It also suggests the opposite – revealing the experience of homelessness as the pre-condition, both ethical and imaginative, for defining hospitality, our ways of relating to others, as others. The novel’s aporetic conclusion reduces the novel’s protracted engagement with hospitality and its absence to the simple gesture of accepting what comes (à venir), a gesture that will, in the end, provide a future (l’avenir). Derrida’s meditations on hospitality repeatedly invoke the mythic figure of Oedipus, and this essay concludes by suggesting that reading Oedipus’ death as a final, transgressive act of hospitality might spark new insights into the man’s death in The Road as well as how a Derridean reading of the impossible poetics of hospitality in The Road prompts a similarly productive engagement with time in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus.

AbstractKlaus Hasselmann was born in Hamburg in 1931. His family fled to England in 1934 because of the Nazis, so he grew up in an English-speaking environment, and returned to Hamburg after the war, where he studied physics, started a family, and became an innovative researcher. Later, he spent several years in the United States of America, but always returned to Hamburg, where he became the founding director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie in 1975. His Institute soon became one of the world’s leading research facilities in the field of climate science. He retired in 2000, but continued his work in climate science as a “grey eminence” in the background, whilst his heart and mind turned to particle physics. He recently turned 90, and we—a group of former co-workers, scientific friends and colleagues—decided that we had to tell the story of this remarkable man.

Abstract This chapter explains how Armstrong became accustomed to the many Sicilians and Italians who had come to populate his neighborhood after the families of newly freed slaves had left New Orleans and the South in general. Armstrong had to balance his feeling of pride with a feeling of constant terror born out of the dangerous atmosphere of the honky-tonk. The chapter elaborates on how Armstrong was stabbed, affirming that his days as a pimp were over almost as soon as they started. Armstrong continued the pattern of working odd jobs during the day and playing Matranga’s and anywhere he could at night well into 1918.

Abstract The lives of Richard Mica and John Jenkins were in many respects so similar that it is somewhat surprising that there is no evidence of their ever having been acquainted. Mica was probably born in 1591 and Jenkins in 1592, both lived through ‘that blody difference between the King and Parliament’, and through the Restoration of the monarchy. Mica died soon after, in 1661, while Jenkins survived until 1678. Both came from comfortable, but essentially working-class environments: Mica’s family were cloth merchants based in Taunton, and Jenkins’s father was a carpenter in Maidstone. But, while Jenkins’s family was demonstrably musical, possessing ‘Seven Vialls and Violyns, One Bandora and a Cytheme’, there is no record to show that Mica’s was musically active. Yet, by the age of eighteen, Mica was proficient enough in the art to have been appointed resident musician at Thomdon Hall, near Brentwood, Essex, home of the noble Catholic Petre family, whose enthusiasm for music was of long standing.

L.M. Singhvi was an eminent jurist, a distinguished parliamentarian, a renowned author, and a successful diplomat. He was the second longest serving Indian High Commissioner to England after Krishna Menon. A lawyer by profession, a professor by attitude, a politician by compulsion, a parliamentarian by choice, a researcher by nature, a gentleman by character, and a humanist by heart—each manifestation excelling the other, he graced many fields of human excellence for a long time. The creativity of a poet, the aesthetics of an art lover, the precision of a professional, the urge of a social reformer are innate elements of his being, which burst out at the slightest touch as flowers blossom in the spring. He was a born genius who left an indelible ...

Abstract It is not known whether Hermann Einstein became a partner in the featherbed enterprise of Israel and Levi before or after August 8, 1876. Certain it is that by then he, his mother, and all his brothers and sisters, had been living for some time in Ulm, in the kingdom of Württemberg. On that eighth of August, Hermann married Pauline Koch in the synagogue in Cannstatt. The young couple settled in Ulm, first on the Münsterplatz, then, at the turn of 1878–9, on the Bahnhofstrasse. On a sunny Friday in the following March their first child was born, a citizen of the new German empire, which Württemberg had joined in 1871. On the following day Hermann went to register the birth of his son. In translation the birth certificate reads, ‘No. 224. Ulm, March 15, 1879.

Abstract A Young couple moved into the house next door about the time I was writing this chapter, and I introduced myself to my new neighbors. “I know you, “ the young man said, “I ‘ve used your book. “ It ‘s a nice distinction, used rather than read, and I felt flattered. Ben Franklin had read Pliny and had smiled at what he wrote, which implies he did not use him, and modern historians of science would applaud his caution. Pliny the Elder, born at Lake Como in the reign of Tiberius, was an indefatigable reader and prolific writer, who needed little sleep, had a slave read to him even during rubdowns after his bath, and had a secretary at his side for dictation at all times.

Abstract The seventeenth century, unlike the sixteenth century, was fertile in the production of philosophers of genius. The man who is often considered the father of modern philosophy is Rene´ Descartes. He was born in 1596, about the time when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, in a village in Touraine which is now called after him La-Haye-Descartes. A sickly child, he was exempted at school from morning exercises and acquired a lifelong habit of meditating in bed. From his eleventh to his nineteenth year he studied classics and philosophy at the Jesuit college of La Fle`che. He remained a Catholic throughout his life, but chose to spend most of his adult life in Protestant Holland.

Petr Hruska (born 1964) is a poet and literary historian from Ostrava. This post-industrial city used to be famous for its black coal mines and steel factories. At the time of the industrial boom, Ostrava started to be a �melting pot� of nations living in this part of Central Europe � the Czechs, Poles, Germans from Silesia, Austrians, Jews, and Slovaks. No wonder, then, that the cultural life of this region differs from that in traditional centres of Czech culture like Prague or Brno. Nevertheless, Hruska�s collections of poems have been awarded the most prestigious Czech literary prizes and are more and more often translated into foreign languages. The following essay is based on the book of Hruska�s selected poems, translated at the Harvard University and published in Britain (Everything Indicates, 2023). After the analyses of Hruska�s main themes and means of their verbal expression, attention must be paid to how he deals with the interplay between the history of individuals and families versus broader social and political contexts. Of course, describing this tension is quite common among artists and experts in social sciences. However, Hruska�s literary texts are in many aspects unconventional because his way of thinking and expression does not follow the typical stylistic norms of both classical and modernist poetry. The methodology of comparative literary studies must be used here because, without it, the international success of the author from a cultural periphery cannot be adequately understood. In his early poems, Hruska was a representative of so-called everyday poetry settled in a small universe of his family and friends. Nevertheless, in his newest collection, I Caught Sight of My Face (Spatril jsem svou tvar, 2022), he takes part in Magellan�s voyage around the world, reflecting on the transient and the eternal aspects of human life. It seems that there is no significant difference between intimate and social history, and Hruska can express it in simple sentences with no complicated metaphors. In the chaos of the postmodern world, this kind of writing can be attractive even for readers who are not fond of traditional poetry.

The Napoleonic Era is a complex and exceptional period in the history of Europe and the world. The leader Napoleon Bonaparte has left an ambiguous legacy, still the result of studies and research. In this article we make a comprehensive assessment of the entire period, from the Consulate stage to the rise and fall of the Empire. Thus, we enter the political, economic, social and mentality terrain of one of the most outstanding temporal spaces in the origins of Contemporary History. The task of writing about the Napoleonic Era and Napoleon himself as a soldier and statesman is always a complex task. The period between 1792 and 1815 is a difficult prism with too many edges... Napoleon: Robespierre�s friend; Napoleon, the soldier who hated popular riots. Napoleon: the man who brought archeology to Egypt; Napoleon: the man who exterminated almost three million people in his ambition in battle after battle during his mandates. Napoleon: the man who with his armies unified Italy for the first time in centuries and also liberated Poland from the Russians; Napoleon: the man who destroyed Spain and Portugal with his armies, plunging them into devastation. Napoleon: the man of the great victory of Austerlitz; Napoleon: the man of the tremendous defeat of Waterloo. Napoleon: the man of the transcendental Civil Code; Napoleon, the man who had no qualms about making almost illegal calls to the ranks of the most inexperienced and innocent youth of France and Europe. Ultimately, his complexity makes him, as an individual, the leader who initiated the Contemporary Stage, as well as its political consequences, a multitude of them to date, only that in the present the media and technology are much greater, although The international political values of power in depth maintain multiple survivals. The present study is a documented reflection on the balance of the Napoleonic Era and of Napoleon himself that aims to delve into the most notable consequences of that stage, also stopping at the stage of the Hundred Days and Waterloo. The methods to carry out the research have been the use of published sources and the extensive existing bibliography on the subject, extracting from here our own results, discussion and conclusions.

Born in 1934 and moved to the Lord in 1982, Father Seraphim Rose carried out his activity against the background of an increasingly fluid world, marked by ideological changes, technological advances and cultural transformations. As a fervent scholar, translator, and ardent monk, Father Seraphim Rose navigated the complexities of modernity, while, passionately advocating for the eternal truths, embedded in Orthodoxy. The text is divided into three sections, each exploring a different aspect of the era. The first section discusses the postwar period, including the economic boom, technological advances, and cultural changes. The second section focuses on the counterculture movement of the 1960�s, including its origins, key figures, and influence on American society. The third section explores the religious landscape of the era, including the rise of Eastern spirituality and the decline of traditional christianity. The text also touches on the life and work of Father Seraphim Rose, who was a prominent figure in the Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia and a defender of traditional christian values. The period after World War II saw significant economic growth and technological advances, which led to changes in American society and culture. The counterculture movement of the 1960�s was characterized by a rejection of mainstream values and a search for alternative forms of spirituality and community. Eastern spirituality, including practices such as yoga and meditation, have gained popularity in the United States of America. The Orthodox Church played a significant role in the american society, during this period, with Father Seraphim Rose being a prominent figure. Overall, the text provides a detailed and nuanced exploration of the cultural and historical context of the 1960�s in the United States of America, with particular emphasis on the rise of the counterculture and eastern spirituality at the expense of traditional Christianity. Therefore, in order to highlight the subject of this study, we have used the analytical, historical and synthesis method, taking into account both Orthodoxy and the ideologies of that time.

Potatoes is the fourth important food crop worldwide after maize, wheat, and rice and are grown in more than 100 countries worldwide under temperate, subtropical and tropical conditions, however, they are considered as cool temperature crop. Potato is one of the most important food crops in Georgia and potato growing has always been the subject of great importance for settlement of food supply problems in country. Potato crops are severely affected by approximately forty soil borne diseases worldwide including those caused by soil inhabiting fungi, bacteria and nematodes. Plant-parasitic nematodes are among the important pests of potato production, they can cause serious yield losses but remain unnoticed, in most cases. Above ground symptoms of nematode damage are rarely observed since most nematodes cause damage on roots and tubers. The aim of this study is to determine the prevalence of plant parasitic nematodes in the main potatoe growing area in Ajara. Fauna of soil nematodes was studied in three villages of Shuakhevi municipality: Dgvani, Dabadzveli and Okhropilauri. Sampling was conducted in nine sites in early spring, in middle summer and in late fall. The 3 composite soil samples collected from each field (weighing 300-500g) consist of 50 individual sub-samples of soil and roots. Nematodes were extracted by a modified Baermann�s method from a sample of 50 g. and exposition time was 48 h. From a total of 83 species of nematodes were found. The richest by the number of species was Dorylaimida order that was presented by 26 species (32 % of species composition). The registered nematodes belong to 2 subclasses, 7 orders, 63 genus and 27 families. The largest abundance of nematodes was observed in the Dgvani village with115 specimens/ 50g soil , and the smallest was in Okhropilauri, with - 37 specimens/50g. Plant-parasitic nematodes from 6 genera (Ditylenchus, Tylechus, Tylenchorhynchus, Helicotylenchus, Pratylenchus, Aphelenchus) were found in soil and (or) potato root samples. All these nematodes can be divided into five groups according to their feeding habits. The omnivore group with 23 species (45,9%) in Spring, 38 species (34,2%) in Summer and 41 species (40,2%) in Autumn, constitut the core of nematode community. Investigations reveal that nematode populations and communities vary seasonally. Plant parasitic nematodes does not exceed a certain limit, which causes measurable economic damage.

In the history of world literature, there are many examples of one book writers, when only one work of the literary heritage of a particular author was famous, in the shadow of which the rest of his work remains. In Vietnamese literature, this is Bao Ninh, the author of the novel The Sorrow of War (first released in 1987 under the title The Destiny of Love), after which his writing life came a long pause. Bao Ninh was born in 1952 in Hanoi. In 1969, he went to the front and fought for the next six years. After the publication of his first novel, The Sorrow of War, he became one of the most famous writers at home and abroad. This book told the real truth about the recent liberation war of the Vietnamese people. His interviews have been published in national and foreign media, which help to understand what happened to the famous novelist over the years. They served a certain compensatory function, allowing Bao Ninh to remain in the national literary process.

Ibrāhīm Zāhid Gīlānī’s (d. 700/1301) full name is Tāc al-Dīn Ibrāhīm b. Rūsen Amīr b. Bābil/ Bīdār al-Sancānī. He was born in Siyāvrūd township of Gīlān province around 615/1218 and died again in the same place in the year 700/1301. Ibrāhīm Zāhid Gīlānī is an important person who lived during the establishment and the spread period of the sūfī orders in Islamic world. He received his mystical training from a sheikh of Suhrawardī sūfī order named Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn Tabrīzī, we have no information about his. Sheikh Zāhid later opened dervish lodges in different cities and did mystical activities. He has become a murshid who is popular amoung people over time. Therefore he is counted as joining person in the chains of many sūfī orders like Khalwatiyya, Safawiyya, Bayramiyya and Jalwatiyya. However, our knowledge of him is very limited. The silence of sūfī sources and modern researches about his is very interesting. In this respect, Ibn Bezzāz’s (d. after 759/1358) Safvat as-Safā that considers Ibrāhīm Zāhid as a sheikh of Safī al-Dīn Ardabīlī is the main source. In this article, we will deal with Ibrāhīm Zāhid Gīlānī’s life, mystical activities, distinct characteristics and political relations. Keywords: Ibrāhīm Zāhid Gīlānī, Ibn Bazzāz, Safvat as-Safā, Gāzān Khān, Zāhidiyya.

Dr. Daniel Savitsky, Professor Emeritus Stevens Institute of Technology, has been a leader in the field of high-speed marine vehicle hydrodynamics for 70 years. His landmark paper, "Hydrodynamic Design of Planing Hulls", published in the very first (1964) edition of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers Marine Technology, is well known to all in the field. An in-depth look at his life and career beyond this singular contribution will be shared in honor of his many contributions to his family, colleagues, students and friends. Dan Savitsky began his career as a student at the College of the City of New York, graduating in 1942 to work for the EDO Corporation at College Point, New York. Here at EDO, his love for the planing surface was born with his involvement in the development of seaplane floats during the war. After being drafted into the Army of the United States, he was assigned to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ Langley Laboratory in 1944, where he advanced his knowledge not only of planing surfaces, but an important future skill, model testing. His next and current home was Stevens Institute’s Davidson Laboratory, where he obtained a Masters degree in 1952 and up the ranks from project engineer to Director of the Laboratory. He later obtained his Doctorate from New York University in 1972, and mentored untold scores of students. He achieved many honors during this time such as the SNAME Cochrane and Davidson awards and the Stevens Jess Davis award. These awards were earned through scientific contributions passed on to us in numerous papers and presentations, as well as through his active participation in professional organizations such as SNAME, ASME, ATTC, ITTC and many more. There are numerous accounts of his kindness and concern as well as scholarly advice to laymen, students and professionals alike. An attempt is made here to present Dr Savitsky’s many contributions, not just a tabulation of his technical achievements, but to include his influence on the many who have worked with or were taught by him.

The dedication of king Aspurgos from Gorgippia AD 6/7, which was published in 2018 (“Bulletin of Ancient History”, № 3), allows to revise some of the established ideas about the reign of the lord of the Bosporus. Aspurgos calls himself the son of “the great king of Asandrokhos” in the inscription. The title “great king” was worn by Asandros (49/48 – 21/20 BC), whom many researchers have considered as the father of Aspurgos. Only the legitimate ruler of the Bosporan kingdom could bear this Achaemenes title. Asandros legitimized his rule and gained access to the Pontic regalia, one of them was the title of “great king”, through his marriage with Dynamis, the daughter of Pharnakes and the granddaughter of Mithridates Eupatoros. Therefore, we have one more argument in favor of the identity of king Asandros and king Asandrokhos as one man. Aspurgos owns the royal title in the inscription and bears the epithet “friend of the Romans”. It is obvious that he received the title and concluded an alliance with Rome earlier than AD 6/7. It is known that in the Bosporan gold coins are minted with monograms , , from 9/8 BC – AD 9/10 (Fig. 1). As many scholars believe, the name of Dynamia hides in the monograms. However, the last three years of issue of the coins with the monograms fall on the documented years of the reign of Aspurgos from AD 6/7 – 9/10. These data give ground for the conclusion that the coinage of gold coins marked the monograms took place during the reign of Aspurgos. The issue of gold coins with the monograms KNE (Fig. 4), ΠΑΡ, ΠΑ in the Bosporus from AD 10/11 – 13/14 also falls on the reign of Aspurgos. In 9/8 BC Aspurgos, using the support of the Aspurgianai and, as the author thinks, the Syrako-Meotians, eliminated the Roman protégé Polemon I (14 – 9/8 BC), who ruled the Bosporus. Since Aspurgos occupied the Bosporan throne against the will of Augustus. The lord of Rome forbade Aspurgos not only to indicate his portrait and his monogram on Bosporan gold coins, but also, as it is assumed, to mention the name of his father Asandros in official documents. The possible course of strong position of Augustus conceals in that these two Bosporan lords were guilty of eliminating three Roman henchmen (Mithridates of Pergamon, Scribonius, Polemon) on the Bosporan throne. The name Asandros (=Asandrokhos) was forgotten in the history of the Bosporus. The Bosporan kings Kotis I, Reskuporides I, Sauromates I traced their origin to Aspurgos. So well, the new documentary evidence confirms the hypothesis that Aspurgos ruled to the Bosporan kingdom from 9/8 BC – AD 38. He was the legitimate heir, the son of Asandros and Dynamis. Aspurgos spent most of AD 14 in Rome, as he was looking for a meeting with Augustus. He returned to the Bosporus in the early of October of AD 14. One of the reasons for his trip was the desire to obtain the consent of Augustus to marry Gepaipyria, the Thracian princess and the granddaughter of Polemon I and Antonina Tryphena. The marriage may have been sanctioned by Augustus and confirmed by Tiberius. Tiberius allowed Aspurgos put his royal monogram on the Bosporan gold coins, and on the reverse side of the copper coins – a portrait of Aspurgos. It is possible before his marriage to Gepaipyria in AD 15/16 Aspurgos was married to a Syracian princess. It was probably she was an offspring of Mithridates Eupatoros or his son Pharnakes. This dynastic alliance was the result of the allied relations between Aspurgos and the Syraco-Meotians, lived on the right bank of the Kuban near the northeastern borders of the Bosporus. They provided significant support to Aspurgos in his struggle for the Bosporan throne with Polemon. It was this military-political alliance, sealed by the marriage of Aspurgos and the Syracian princess, which forced Augustus, as it seems, to keep the royal throne for the recalcitrant Bosporan. Many scholars have believed that Mithridates III and Kotis I were born in wedlock of Aspurgos and Gepaipyria. However, after the death of Aspurgos in AD the late 37 – the early 38 year, Gepaipyria occupied the Bosporan throne. It is in all probability, Mithridates, the eldest son of Aspurgos, left the Bosporus in that time because of his voyage to Rome. A number of researchers have believed that this happened due to the infancy of the royal heirs. The image of king Mithridates III, containing on the front side of the Bosporan copper coins of AD 39 year, refutes this opinion (Fig. 5). The king depicts as a mustachioed and bearded man, with long hair. The iconography of the king’s portrait corresponds to the age category “an adult man”, according to ancient canons over 25 years old. The image gives reason to believe that Mithridates was born before the marriage of Aspurgos and Gepaipyria. It is apparently that Mithridates III was born in the marriage of Aspurgos and the Syracian princess. He was the last representative of the “Pontic” line of the royal family of the Bosporus in AD I century.

This paper presents an overview of Victor Papanek’s book Design for the Real World (1971) from the perspective of current 3rd year industrial design students, members of GenZ, combined with the perspectives of the educators/authors who read the original edition of the book in the 70s and 80s. Students read individual chapters the 2019 edition of this book, wrote a critical review, and presented their overviews and findings in two lengthy class discussions that allowed them to ‘read’ the entire book. The perspectives of the students and educators (from very different generations) reveal an interesting story about the Austrian-born American designer and educator’s writings. In this paper we reveal the continued relevance and critically analyze Papanek’s writings by illustrating how his views on socially and environmentally responsible design live on.Taking his early design inspiration from Raymond Loewy, Papanek went on to study architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright. An early follower and ally of Buckminster Fuller, a designer and systems theorist, Papanek applied principles of socially responsible design, both in theory and practice ultimately working on collaborative projects with UNESCO and the World Health Organization. In Design for the Real World, Papanek professed his philosophy that objects or systems work as political tools for change. He became a controversial voice within that time frame as he declared that many consumer products were frivolous, excessive, and lacked basic functionality causing them to be recklessly dangerous to the users. His ideas seemed extreme, echoed by many other environmental philosophers at the time, at that point in history, but perhaps viewed from the 21st century seem prophetic. An advocate for responsible design, Papanek had visionary ideas on design theory. Papanek felt it was important to put the user first when designing. He spent time observing indigenous communities in developing countries, working directly with, and studying people of different cultures and backgrounds. Papanek designed for people with disabilities often in pursuit of a better world for all. He also addressed themes that have continue to be overlooked in design in the 21st century - inclusion, social justice, appropriate technology, and sustainability.Papanek ultimately earned the respect of many talented colleagues. He would go on to design, teach, and write for future generations. Opposing the ideals of planned obsolescence and the mass consumerism that fuels it, his work encompassed what would become the idea of sustainable design and decreasing overproduction for the consumer market. Themes from Design for the Real World remain relevant, and today it has become one of the most widely read books on design; resulting in Papanek’s voice continuing to push designers to uplift their morals and standards in practicing design.This paper highlights Papanek’s values of designing thoughtfully and for all, while revealing the details on the relevance of his writings five decades after the original publication.

Martín de Ximena Jurado was born in 1615 in the province of Jaén (Spain). He was a humanist with ecclesiastical studies who showed great interest in history and in the monuments and objects of the past, and who came to be considered one of the most authoritative historians in the ancient Kingdom of Jaén. He was a pioneer in the cartographic study of this territory, and tried to represent the defensive architecture of the region in his own particular graphic language. This is demonstrated by the vast documentation compiled in the work known as Antigüedades del Reyno de Jaén (Ms. 1180 B.N. of the Spanish National Library), an unfinished collection of drawings of various types, personal notes, and a variety of informative notes.The around thirty of Ximena Jurado’s drawings that depict fortifications of which there still remain today can be divided into three main categories: fortified towns and cities, small fortified enclosures, and isolated towers. The Islamic and Christian fortresses that he mapped were drawn with their most characteristic elements of construction, representing the idealized hypothesis of their state in the time after the Castilian conquest in the 13th century.This paper studies the sketches drawn of several isolated towers located next to religious buildings or to other fortified enclosures. To three of them Ximena Jurado dedicated an entire page each: Tower of Cazalilla, Tower of San Julián and Tower of Escañuela. He also pointed out some watchtowers linked to other fortifications. These drawings allow us to understand the evolution of these examples of medieval defensive architecture and what remains of them.

Robert Duncan Milne (1844-99), from Cupar, Fife, was a pioneering author of science fiction stories, most of which appeared in San Francisco’s Argonaut magazine in the 1880s and ’90s. SF historian Sam Moskowitz credits Milne with being the first full-time SF writer, and his contribution to the genre is arguably greater than anyone else including Stevenson and Conan Doyle, yet it has all but disappeared into oblivion. Milne was fascinated by science. He drew on the work of Scottish physicists and inventors such as James Clark Maxwell and Alexander Graham Bell into the possibilities of electromagnetic forces and new communications media to overcome distances in space and time. Milne wrote about visual time-travelling long before H.G. Wells. He foresaw virtual ‘tele-presencing’, remote surveillance, mobile phones and worldwide satellite communications – not to mention climate change, scientific terrorism and drone warfare, cryogenics and molecular reengineering. Milne also wrote on alien life forms, artificial immortality, identity theft and personality exchange, lost worlds and the rediscovery of extinct species. ‘A New Palingenesis’, originally published in The Argonaut on July 7th 1883, and adapted in this comic, is a secular version of the resurrection myth. Mary Shelley was the first scientiser of the occult to rework the supernatural idea of reanimating the dead through the mysterious powers of electricity in Frankenstein (1818). In Milne’s story, in which Doctor S- dissolves his terminally ill wife’s body in order to bring her back to life in restored health, is a striking, further modernisation of Frankenstein, to reflect late-nineteenth century interest in electromagnetic science and spiritualism. In particular, it is a retelling of Shelley’s narrative strand about Frankenstein’s aborted attempt to shape a female mate for his creature, but also his misogynistic ambition to bypass the sexual principle in reproducing life altogether. By doing so, Milne interfused Shelley’s updating of the Promethean myth with others. ‘A New Palingenesis’ is also a version of Pygmalion and his male-ordered, wish-fulfilling desire to animate his idealised female sculpture, Galatea from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, perhaps giving a positive twist to Orpheus’s attempt to bring his corpse-bride Eurydice back from the underworld as well? With its basis in spiritualist ideas about the soul as a kind of electrical intelligence, detachable from the body but a material entity nonetheless, Doctor S- treats his wife as an ‘intelligent battery’. He is thus able to preserve her personality after death and renew her body simultaneously because that captured electrical intelligence also carries a DNA-like code for rebuilding the individual organism itself from its chemical constituents. The descriptions of the experiment and the body’s gradual re-materialisation are among Milne’s most visually impressive, anticipating the X-raylike anatomisation and reversal of Griffin’s disappearance process in Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897). In the context of the 1880s, it must have been a compelling scientisation of the paranormal, combining highly technical descriptions of the Doctor’s system of electrically linked glass coffins with ghostly imagery. It is both dramatic and highly visual, even cinematic in its descriptions, and is here brought to life in the form of a comic.

Executive Summary This report describes a series of experiments carried out by PRICE Lab, a research programme at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) jointly funded by the Central Bank of Ireland, the Commission for Energy Regulation, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and the Commission for Communications Regulation. The experiments were conducted with samples of Irish consumers aged 18-70 years and were designed to answer the following general research question: At what point do products become too complex for consumers to choose accurately between the good ones and the bad ones? BACKGROUND AND METHODS PRICE Lab represents a departure from traditional methods employed for economic research in Ireland. It belongs to the rapidly expanding area of ‘behavioural economics’, which is the application of psychological insights to economic analysis. In recent years, behavioural economics has developed novel methods and generated many new findings, especially in relation to the choices made by consumers. These scientific advances have implications both for economics and for policy. They suggest that consumers often do not make decisions in the way that economists have traditionally assumed. The findings show that consumers have limited capacity for attending to and processing information and that they are prone to systematic biases, all of which may lead to disadvantageous choices. In short, consumers may make costly mistakes. Research has indeed documented that in several key consumer markets, including financial services, utilities and telecommunications, many consumers struggle to choose the best products for themselves. It is often argued that these markets involve ‘complex’ products. The obvious question that arises is whether consumer policy can be used to help them to make better choices when faced with complex products. Policies are more likely to be successful where they are informed by an accurate understanding of how real consumers make decisions between products. To provide evidence for consumer policy, PRICE Lab has developed a method for measuring the accuracy with which consumers make choices, using techniques adapted from the scientific study of human perception. The method allows researchers to measure how reliably consumers can distinguish a good deal from a bad one. A good deal is defined here as one where the product is more valuable than the price paid. In other words, it offers good value for money or, in the jargon of economics, offers the consumer a ‘surplus’. Conversely, a bad deal offers poor value for money, providing no (or a negative) surplus. PRICE Lab’s main experimental method, which we call the ‘Surplus Identification’ (S-ID) task, allows researchers to measure how accurately consumers can spot a surplus and whether they are prone to systematic biases. Most importantly, the S-ID task can be used to study how the accuracy of consumers’ decisions changes as the type of product changes. For the experiments we report here, samples of consumers arrived at the ESRI one at a time and spent approximately one hour doing the S-ID task with different kinds of products, which were displayed on a computer screen. They had to learn to judge the value of one or more products against prices and were then tested for accuracy. As well as people’s intrinsic motivation to do well when their performance on a task like this is tested, we provided an incentive: one in every ten consumers who attended PRICE Lab won a prize, based on their performance. Across a series of these experiments, we were able to test how the accuracy of consumers’ decisions was affected by the number and nature of the product’s characteristics, or ‘attributes’, which they had to take into account in order to distinguish good deals from bad ones. In other words, we were able to study what exactly makes for a ‘complex’ product, in the sense that consumers find it difficult to choose good deals. FINDINGS Overall, across all ten experiments described in this report, we found that consumers’ judgements of the value of products against prices were surprisingly inaccurate. Even when the product was simple, meaning that it consisted of just one clearly perceptible attribute (e.g. the product was worth more when it was larger), consumers required a surplus of around 16-26 per cent of the total price range in order to be able to judge accurately that a deal was a good one rather than a bad one. Put another way, when most people have to map a characteristic of a product onto a range of prices, they are able to distinguish at best between five and seven levels of value (e.g. five levels might be thought of as equivalent to ‘very bad’, ‘bad’, ‘average’, ‘good’, ‘very good’). Furthermore, we found that judgements of products against prices were not only imprecise, but systematically biased. Consumers generally overestimated what products at the top end of the range were worth and underestimated what products at the bottom end of the range were worth, typically by as much as 10-15 per cent and sometimes more. We then systematically increased the complexity of the products, first by adding more attributes, so that the consumers had to take into account, two, three, then four different characteristics of the product simultaneously. One product might be good on attribute A, not so good on attribute B and available at just above the xii | PRICE Lab: An Investigation of Consumers’ Capabilities with Complex Products average price; another might be very good on A, middling on B, but relatively expensive. Each time the consumer’s task was to judge whether the deal was good or bad. We would then add complexity by introducing attribute C, then attribute D, and so on. Thus, consumers had to negotiate multiple trade-offs. Performance deteriorated quite rapidly once multiple attributes were in play. Even the best performers could not integrate all of the product information efficiently – they became substantially more likely to make mistakes. Once people had to consider four product characteristics simultaneously, all of which contributed equally to the monetary value of the product, a surplus of more than half the price range was required for them to identify a good deal reliably. This was a fundamental finding of the present experiments: once consumers had to take into account more than two or three different factors simultaneously their ability to distinguish good and bad deals became strikingly imprecise. This finding therefore offered a clear answer to our primary research question: a product might be considered ‘complex’ once consumers must take into account more than two or three factors simultaneously in order to judge whether a deal is good or bad. Most of the experiments conducted after we obtained these strong initial findings were designed to test whether consumers could improve on this level of performance, perhaps for certain types of products or with sufficient practice, or whether the performance limits uncovered were likely to apply across many different types of product. An examination of individual differences revealed that some people were significantly better than others at judging good deals from bad ones. However the differences were not large in comparison to the overall effects recorded; everyone tested struggled once there were more than two or three product attributes to contend with. People with high levels of numeracy and educational attainment performed slightly better than those without, but the improvement was small. We also found that both the high level of imprecision and systematic bias were not reduced substantially by giving people substantial practice and opportunities to learn – any improvements were slow and incremental. A series of experiments was also designed to test whether consumers’ capability was different depending on the type of product attribute. In our initial experiments the characteristics of the products were all visual (e.g., size, fineness of texture, etc.). We then performed similar experiments where the relevant product information was supplied as numbers (e.g., percentages, amounts) or in categories (e.g., Type A, Rating D, Brand X), to see whether performance might improve. This question is important, as most financial and contractual information is supplied to consumers in a numeric or categorical form. The results showed clearly that the type of product information did not matter for the level of imprecision and bias in consumers’ decisions – the results were essentially the same whether the product attributes were visual, numeric or categorical. What continued to drive performance was how many characteristics the consumer had to judge simultaneously. Thus, our findings were not the result of people failing to perceive or take in information accurately. Rather, the limiting factor in consumers’ capability was how many different factors they had to weigh against each other at the same time. In most of our experiments the characteristics of the product and its monetary value were related by a one-to-one mapping; each extra unit of an attribute added the same amount of monetary value. In other words, the relationships were all linear. Because other findings in behavioural economics suggest that consumers might struggle more with non-linear relationships, we designed experiments to test them. For example, the monetary value of a product might increase more when the amount of one attribute moves from very low to low, than when it moves from high to very high. We found that this made no difference to either the imprecision or bias in consumers’ decisions provided that the relationship was monotonic (i.e. the direction of the relationship was consistent, so that more or less of the attribute always meant more or less monetary value respectively). When the relationship involved a turning point (i.e. more of the attribute meant higher monetary value but only up to a certain point, after which more of the attribute meant less value) consumers’ judgements were more imprecise still. Finally, we tested whether familiarity with the type of product improved performance. In most of the experiments we intentionally used products that were new to the experimental participants. This was done to ensure experimental control and so that we could monitor learning. In the final experiment reported here, we used two familiar products (Dublin houses and residential broadband packages) and tested whether consumers could distinguish good deals from bad deals any better among these familiar products than they could among products that they had never seen before, but which had the same number and type of attributes and price range. We found that consumers’ performance was the same for these familiar products as for unfamiliar ones. Again, what primarily determined the amount of imprecision and bias in consumers’ judgments was the number of attributes that they had to balance against each other, regardless of whether these were familiar or novel. POLICY IMPLICATIONS There is a menu of consumer polices designed to assist consumers in negotiating complex products. A review, including international examples, is given in the main body of the report. The primary aim is often to simplify the consumer’s task. Potential policies, versions of which already exist in various forms and which cover a spectrum of interventionist strength, might include: the provision and endorsement of independent, transparent price comparison websites and other choice engines (e.g. mobile applications, decision software); the provision of high quality independent consumer advice; ‘mandated simplification’, whereby regulations stipulate that providers must present product information in a simplified and standardised format specifically determined by regulation; and more strident interventions such as devising and enforcing prescriptive rules and regulations in relation to permissible product descriptions, product features or price structures. The present findings have implications for such policies. However, while the experimental findings have implications for policy, it needs to be borne in mind that the evidence supplied here is only one factor in determining whether any given intervention in markets is likely to be beneficial. The findings imply that consumers are likely to struggle to choose well in markets with products consisting of multiple important attributes that must all be factored in when making a choice. Interventions that reduce this kind of complexity for consumers may therefore be beneficial, but nothing in the present research addresses the potential costs of such interventions, or how providers are likely to respond to them. The findings are also general in nature and are intended to give insights into consumer choices across markets. There are likely to be additional factors specific to certain markets that need to be considered in any analysis of the costs and benefits of a potential policy change. Most importantly, the policy implications discussed here are not specific to Ireland or to any particular product market. Furthermore, they should not be read as criticisms of existing regulatory regimes, which already go to some lengths in assisting consumers to deal with complex products. Ireland currently has extensive regulations designed to protect consumers, both in general and in specific markets, descriptions of which can be found in Section 9.1 of the main report. Nevertheless, the experiments described here do offer relevant guidance for future policy designs. For instance, they imply that while policies that make it easier for consumers to switch providers may be necessary to encourage active consumers, they may not be sufficient, especially in markets where products are complex. In order for consumers to benefit, policies that help them to identify better deals reliably may also be required, given the scale of inaccuracy in consumers’ decisions that we record in this report when products have multiple important attributes. Where policies are designed to assist consumer decisions, the present findings imply quite severe limits in relation to the volume of information consumers can simultaneously take into account. Good impartial Executive Summary | xv consumer advice may limit the volume of information and focus on ensuring that the most important product attributes are recognised by consumers. The findings also have implications for the role of competition. While consumers may obtain substantial potential benefits from competition, their capabilities when faced with more complex products are likely to reduce such benefits. Pressure from competition requires sufficient numbers of consumers to spot and exploit better value offerings. Given our results, providers with larger market shares may face incentives to increase the complexity of products in an effort to dampen competitive pressure and generate more market power. Where marketing or pricing practices result in prices or attributes with multiple components, our findings imply that consumer choices are likely to become less accurate. Policymakers must of course be careful in determining whether such practices amount to legitimate innovations with potential consumer benefit. Yet there is a genuine danger that spurious complexity can be generated that confuses consumers and protects market power. The results described here provide backing for the promotion and/or provision by policymakers of high-quality independent choice engines, including but not limited to price comparison sites, especially in circumstances where the number of relevant product attributes is high. A longer discussion of the potential benefits and caveats associated with such policies is contained in the main body of the report. Mandated simplification policies are gaining in popularity internationally. Examples include limiting the number of tariffs a single energy company can offer or standardising health insurance products, both of which are designed to simplify the comparisons between prices and/or product attributes. The present research has some implications for what might make a good mandate. Consumer decisions are likely to be improved where a mandate brings to the consumer’s attention the most important product attributes at the point of decision. The present results offer guidance with respect to how many key attributes consumers are able simultaneously to trade off, with implications for the design of standardised disclosures. While bearing in mind the potential for imposing costs, the results also suggest benefits to compulsory ‘meta-attributes’ (such as APRs, energy ratings, total costs, etc.), which may help consumers to integrate otherwise separate sources of information. FUTURE RESEARCH The experiments described here were designed to produce findings that generalise across multiple product markets. However, in addition to the results outlined in this report, the work has resulted in new experimental methods that can be applied to more specific consumer policy issues. This is possible because the methods generate experimental measures of the accuracy of consumers’ decision-making. As such, they can be adapted to assess the quality of consumers’ decisions in relation to specific products, pricing and marketing practices. Work is underway in PRICE Lab that applies these methods to issues in specific markets, including those for personal loans, energy and mobile phones.