Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Christopher McKnight Nichols
On 22 May 1947, President Harry Truman signed the formal “Agreements on Aid to Greece and Turkey,” the central pillars of what became known as the “Truman Doctrine.” Though the principles of the policy were first articulated in a speech to a joint session of Congress on 12 March 1947, it took two months for Truman to line up the funding for Greece and Turkey and get the legislation passed through Congress.
By Zygmunt Pizlo, Yunfeng Li, Tadamasa Sawada, and Robert M. Steinman
The most general definition of symmetry is self-similarity: that one part of an object, pattern, signal, or process is similar, or more-or-less identical to another. According to this definition, the complete absence of symmetry is equivalent to perfect randomness, so symmetry is another name for redundancy.
By Jean Pisani-Ferry
At the end of May, 400 million EU citizens will be called to participate in the second-largest direct election in the world (the first being held in India). Since they last went to the polls to elect their parliament, in 2009, Europe has gone through an acute crisis that precipitated several countries deeper into recession than any peacetime shock they had suffered for a century.
By Anatoly Liberman
There is an almost incomprehensible number of English words for money and various coins. Some of them, like shilling, are very old. We know (or we think that we know) where they came from. Other words (the majority) surfaced as slang, and our record of them seldom goes beyond the early modern period.
By Christopher Hood, Desmond King, and Gillian Peele
Why are there now more salaried academic political scientists than salaried politicians in Britain today? There are well over 2,000 academic members listed in the current directory of the UK’s main political-science association (the PSA) – more than twice the number of elected members of the Westminster, devolved and European parliaments put together.
Define poverty as living with two dollars a day or less. Now imagine that governments could put those two dollars and one cent in every poor person’s pocket with little effort and minimal waste. Poverty is finished. Of course, things are more complicated than that. But you get a sense of where modern social policy is going—and what will soon be possible.
By Heather Strang, Peter Neyroud, and Lawrence Sherman
There is a widely-repeated claim that victims of domestic abuse suffer an average of 35 incidents before the first call to the police. The claim is frequently repeated by senior police officers, by Ministers, by government reports, by academics and by domestic abuse victim advocates.
By Borzu Sabahi and Diora Ziyaeva
Contracts for exploitation of natural resources are usually awarded to foreign investors following demanding bidding processes during which the host government carefully vets qualifications of foreign investors. The process is designed to ensure that the investor has, among other things, sufficient expertise and resources to work on the project.
By Susan Ware
In 1928 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly the Atlantic Ocean, a feat which made her an instant celebrity even though she was only a passenger, or in her self-deprecating description, “a sack of potatoes.”
The 90th annual conference of the Police Federation of England and Wales (commonly known as POLFED) starts today in Bournemouth. Running from 20-22 May, the event will see police officers from England, Wales, and further afield join with representatives from policing agencies, the legal profession, and the government to discuss pressing issues from the world of policing and within the Police Federation itself.
By Catherine Grant
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, it’s not just plants and animals that are becoming extinct at alarming rates. The world’s languages and cultures are disappearing too, and the pace is even worse.
This week is National Library and Information Week in Australia — a week-long celebration of library and information professionals across the country. To celebrate the wonderful work of Australian libraries and librarians, here are a few thoughts on why libraries are so important, from those at the very heart of them.
Monday, 19 May is Victoria Day in Canada, which celebrates the 195th birthday of Queen Victoria on 24 May 1819. On 20 June 1837, at the age of 18, Queen Victoria took the throne as Monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, as the Empire was called at that point.
By Fleur Johns
Public international lawyers are forever in catch-up mode, or so it seems. The international legal appetite for ‘raw’ data of global life is seemingly inexhaustible and worry about the discipline lagging behind technology is perennial. There has, accordingly, been considerable energy devoted to ‘cybernating’ international law, in one way or another, or adapting the discipline to new possibilities posed by digital technology.
A hundred years on, the First World War still shapes the world in which we live. Its legacy survives in poetry, in prose, in collective memory, and in political culture. By the time the war ended in 1918, millions had died. Three major empires – Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans – lay shattered by defeat. A fourth, Russia, was in the throes of a revolution that helped define the rest of the century.
By Y. S. Chen
Aronofsky’s Noah Movie has aroused many criticisms for the ways it has rewritten the biblical story of the Flood. It is observed that not only has the movie added extra materials to, as well as removed original elements from, the biblical account, but more seriously it has also modified and darkened the character of Noah and even of God.