Columbine

Photo credit, C Gracie.

We have few red-flowered plants in the eastern United States, most likely due to our paucity of hummingbird species as compared to other parts of the country. Red is a color known to be attractive to hummingbirds, but not as much so to other potential pollinators. The blooming of columbine coincides with the return of ruby-throated hummingbirds from their winter locales and provides them with a welcome source of nectar after their long journeys. The nectar is held at the tips of the long spurs, where it is accessible only to hummingbirds and some bumblebees. Columbine is frequently found growing on rocky ledges and cliff faces.   For a high-res version of this image, please contact blog@press.princeton.edu.     Read more in Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast by Carol Gracie Wildflower Wednesday

David Vogel, whose book The Politics of Precaution: Regulating Health, Safety, and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States was published this Spring, will be in the UK on 10 May and will be speaking at the Said Business School, Oxford at 11.30am, and the London School of Economics at 6.30pm.

Please follow links to sign up for either of these events or contact Julia Hall jhall@pupress.co.uk for more information.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of renowned mathematician–and World War II hero–Alan Turing, his biographer Andrew Hodges conducted a podcast with IEEE Spectrum’s Steven Cherry for their Techwise Converstaions. To hear a lively and entertaining discussion on the man, click below. To learn more about the fascinating yet tragic life of Alan Turing, check out Andrew Hodges’s new Centenary Edition of his classic work ALAN TURING: The Enigma.

As part of Election 101, we are posting exclusive content from The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History on subjects related to Election 2012.

“War and politics have always been entwined in American history,” writes Michael Sherry in the opening to this article that tackles among other things how war affects the presidency.

The presidency underlines how war and politics constituted each other. War or its apparent threat underwrote the presidency’s expanding powers, both legal and illegal. Major crises, none more so than 9/11, produced presidential claims that constitutional provisions, international laws, and humanitarian norms should be altered, suspended, or reinterpreted. War also brought greater power for individual presidents, though less often lasting glory. Many Americans suspected presidents of using war for political gain, but presidents usually achieved little that endured. Those who secured lasting luster— Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt— died before the emergence of the sour aftermath war usually presents. Woodrow Wilson’s presidency crumbled after World War I; Republicans seized the White House in 1921. Truman and the Democrats barely survived World War II’s aftermath and then succumbed to the Korean War; a Republican, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, became president in 1953. The Vietnam War and their handling of it destroyed the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon (his abuse of war powers shaped the Watergate crisis of 1973– 74). Difficult wars readily damaged presidents, as George W. Bush found in the Iraq War, but even a triumphant Gulf War gave no lasting political traction to his father, defeated in 1992 by Bill Clinton. By the same token, three of the four post- 1945 presidents who served two full terms— Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton— avoided costly war making and remained popular. War was as fickle in its political ramifications as in its conduct and global consequences, often overwhelming the state’s ability to control it and ensnaring presidents.

Read the complete article here: http://press.princeton.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/2Voting.DemocracyasNationalValue.pdf

The preceding is an excerpt from The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History, edited by Michael Kazin, Rebecca Edwards, and Adam Rothman. To learn more about this book, please visit http://press.princeton.edu. Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press. No part of this text may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

Virginia Bluebells

Photo credit, C Gracie.

Virginia bluebells provide an array of changing colors in spring, beginning with the deep purple of their newly emerged leaves, which soon turns to a soft green contrasting nicely with the pink flower buds. As the buds mature, they turn a clear, sky blue just before opening. The color change is caused by changes in the pH of the sap. Virginia bluebells is a perennial plant that grows well in shade and provides a lovely contrast to the many yellow-flowered species in bloom at this time.   For a high-res version of this image, please contact blog@press.princeton.edu.     Read more in Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast by Carol Gracie Wildflower Wednesday

Sociologist Jennifer Lena was kind enough to provide Election 101 with another fascinating installment to what will ultimately be a three part series of posts on music in presidential campaigns. Check out her new book, Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music and her post on the uses and abuses of music by politicians after the jump:

Paul Seabright, whose book ‘The War of the Sexes’ is published on 10 May, will be in the UK on 14^th and 15^th May. He will be talking at the Bristol Festival of Ideas on 14 May and at the RSA on 15 May. Please follow links to sign up for either of these events or contact Caroline Priday cpriday@pupress.co.uk
for further information regarding his trip.

Michael Ross, author of the recently published ‘The Oil Curse’ visited the UK in March and recorded a Guardian video and a podcast with VoxEU. Please follow the links to listen to either of these.

As part of Election 101, we are posting exclusive content from The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History on subjects related to Election 2012.

Alexander Keyssar examines how the right to vote became a reality for every American in this fascinating article. He demonstrates that what we take for granted was hard-earned and fought for and may still need protection.

The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was a major milestone in the history of the right to vote. Yet significant barriers to universal suffrage remained in place, and they were not shaken by either the prosperity of the 1920s or the Great Depression of the 1930s. African Americans in the South remained disfranchised, many immigrants still had to pass literacy tests, and some recipients of relief in the 1930s were threatened with exclusion because they were “paupers.” Pressures for change, however, began to build during World War II, and they intensified in the 1950s and 1960s. The result was the most sweeping transformation in voting rights in the nation’s history: almost all remaining limitations on the franchise were eliminated as the federal government overrode the long tradition of states’ rights and became the guarantor of universal suffrage. Although focused initially on African Americans in the South, the movement for change spread rapidly, touching all regions of the nation.

Not surprisingly, such a major set of changes had multiple sources.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century:

Conflict over the exercise of the right to vote could still be found in the United States more than 200 years after the nation’s founding. Indeed, the disputed presidential election of 2000, between Al Gore and George W. Bush, revolved in part around yet another dimension of the right to vote— the right to have one’s vote counted, and counted accurately. Perhaps inescapably, the breadth of the franchise, as well as the ease with which it could be exercised, remained embedded in partisan politics, in the pursuit of power in the world’s most powerful nation. The outcomes of elections mattered, and those outcomes often were determined not just by how people voted but also by who voted. The long historical record suggested that— however much progress had been achieved between 1787 and 2008— there would be no final settlement of this issue. The voting rights of at least some Americans could always be potentially threatened and consequently would always be in need of protection.

Read the complete article here: http://press.princeton.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/2Voting.DemocracyasNationalValue.pdf

The preceding is an excerpt from The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History, edited by Michael Kazin, Rebecca Edwards, and Adam Rothman. To learn more about this book, please visit http://press.princeton.edu. Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press. No part of this text may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

Tim Chartier, co-author with Anne Greenbaum of Numerical Methods: Design, Analysis, and Computer Implementation of Algorithms, explains how to make sense of big data with numerical analysis.

You submit a query to Google or watch football bowl games as we enter a new year. In either case, you benefit from mathematical methods that can garner meaningful information from large amounts of data. Such techniques fall in the field of data mining.

Massive datasets are available with every passing minute in our world. For example, during the Oscars in February, the Cirque du Soleil performance resulted in 18,718 tweets in one minute according to TweetReachBlog. While tweets cannot exceed 140 characters in length, their average length is 81.9 characters according to MediaFuturist. So, in one minute, approximately 1.5 million characters zoomed through Twitter. From Wikipedia, we’ll take the average length of a word (in English) to be 5.1 characters. Assuming these Oscar tweets are written in English and conform to the standard length of words, 300,000 words were tweeted in one minute. This is approximately the number of words contained in the entire Hunger Games Trilogy!

Mathematical models and numerical analysis play important roles in data mining. For example, a foundational part of Google’s search engine algorithm is a method called PageRank. In Anne Greenbaum and my book, Numerical Methods: Design, Analysis, and Computer Implementation of Algorithms, published by Princeton University Press, we discuss the PageRank method– both its underlying mathematical model and how it is computed on a computer.

In an exercise in the text, you can develop a system of linear equations in a manner similar to that used by the Bowl Championship Series to rank college football teams (editor – or college basketball teams for March Madness). An important part of this problem is developing the linear system. Our text also discusses the computation challenges of such problems and what numerical methods result in the most accurate results.

Many techniques utilized to solve the large linear systems of data mining are also utilized in engineering and science. The book discusses how large linear systems (containing millions of rows) can derive from problems involving partial differential equations. Again, the book analyzes the efficiency and accuracy of the methods utilized to solve such systems. Such techniques led to the computed animated figures we enjoy in modern movies and aid in simulating the aerodynamics of a car created with computer-aided design.

As stated at the opening of Chapter 1 of the text, “Numerical methods play an important role in modern science. Scientific exploration is often conducted on computers rather than laboratory equipment. While it is rarely meant to completely replace work in the scientific laboratory, computer simulation often complements this work.” As such modern science demands the use and understanding of numerical methods.

Some links to explore this subject further:

• An excerpt from The Spirit of Compromise by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9657.pdf
• A written Q&A with the authors: http://press.princeton.edu/releases/m9657.html
• A review by Paul Starr in the next issue of The New Republic: http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/102761/compromise-margalit-guttmann-thompson-yalta?page=0,0
• Happily Mr. Starr also reviews another PUP title On Compromise and Rotten Compromises by Avishai Margalit — we are the one-stop shop for political compromise books whether your interest is domestic or international

John Tomasi, author of the recently published Free Market Fairness, will be in London for the week of 30 April. He will be talking at the Legatum Institute on 1 May, IPPR on 2 May, the Royal Society of Arts on 3 May, and the Adam Smith Institute on 3 May.

Please follow links for more information or to sign up for any of these events. If you have any queries about his visit please contact Julia Hall on jhall@pupress.co.uk