This book produces a major rethinking of the history of development after 1940 through an exploration of Britain’s ambitions for industrialisation in its Caribbean colonies. Industrial development is a neglected topic in histories of the British Colonial Empire, and we know very little of plans for Britain’s Caribbean colonies in general in the late colonial period, despite the role played …
The phrase ‘here be monsters’ or ‘here be dragons’ is commonly believed to have been used on ancient maps to indicate unexplored territories which might hide unknown beasts. This book maps and explores places between science and politics that have been left unexplored, sometimes hiding in plain sight - in an era when increased emphasis was put on 'openness'. The book is rooted in a prog…
An interesting fact in nature is that if we observe agents (neurons, particles, animals, humans) behaving,or more precisely moving, inside their environment, we can recognize – tough at different space or time scales – very specific patterns. The existence of those patterns is quite obvious, since not all things in nature behave totally at random, especially if we take into account thinking…
The European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) is the oldest and widest European intergovernmental network for cooperation in research. Established by the Ministerial Conference in November 1971, COST is presently used by more than 30.000 scientists of 35 European countries to cooperate in common research projects supported by national funds. The financial support for cooperation net…
In this thesis, we study the dynamics of an elastic body whose shape and position evolve due to the gravitational forces exerted by a point-like planet whose position is fixed in the space. The first result of the thesis is that, if any internal deformation of the body dissipates some energy, then the dynamics of the system has only three possible final behaviors: (i) the satellite is expelled …
In 1865, British polymath Francis Galton published his initial thoughts about the scientific field that would become ‘eugenics.’ The same year, Russian physician Vasilii Florinskii addressed similar issues in a sizeable treatise, entitled Human Perfection and Degeneration. Initially unheralded, Florinskii’s book would go on to have a remarkable afterlife in twentieth- and twenty-first-cen…
"Consciousness is widely perceived as one of the most fundamental, interesting and difficult problems of our time. However, we still know next to nothing about the relationship between consciousness and the brain and we can only speculate about the consciousness of animals and machines. Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation for the scientific study of consciousness. It sets …
What does it mean to be a scientist working today; specifically, a scientist whose subject matter is human life? Scientists often overstate their claim to certainty, sorting the world into categorical distinctions that obstruct rather than clarify its complexities. In this book Daniel Nettle urges the reader to unpick such distinctions—biological versus social sciences, mind versus body, and …
"The role of parents in shaping the characters of their children, the causes of violence and crime, and the roots of personal unhappiness are central to humanity. Like so many fundamental questions about human existence, these issues all relate to behavioural development. In this lucid and accessible book, eminent biologist Professor Sir Patrick Bateson suggests that the nature/nurture dichotom…