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This chapter describes the aftermath of WWII and the challenges society faced in housing and caring for the generation of baby boomers who were born into extreme deprivation. It discusses impoverished WWII war widows with children; women with illegitimate children; and WWII soldiers who falsified their death so as not to be responsible for an out-of-wedlock child. The chapter touches, for example, upon Ed Rohs' mother desperate straits and the ramifications of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy for a poor young woman in 1946. The chapter describes how, when he was six months old, Ed's parents brought him to the Angel Guardian Home for Infants in Brooklyn under the auspices of the Sisters of Mercy.

This chapter examines the relationship between local deities and the ancestral dead. There are a vast number of tales in the early Buddhist literature that detail situations in which a dangerous demigod or ghost confronts the Buddha, a monk, or a nun. With few exceptions, these tales conclude when the supernatural being realizes that it is unable to sway or harm its intended victim and, after a brief sermon, the creature ends up being converted to Buddhism as a new guardian of the faith. These tales demonstrate the Buddhist efficacy in helping the dead and relate to the development of the monks’ role as funerary experts. This growing association between the Buddhist community and the dead receives additional support from an analysis of the thousands of votive stupas (relic mounds) that have been dedicated by lay devotees to the memory of deceased relatives and are found at the majority of early Buddhist sites.

This penultimate chapter examines the way in which English law could, and arguably should, draw on the experience of the civilian tradition to restructure its law of civil wrongs. The starting point is that it has inherited from its actional past causes of action ‘named so as to intersect’ (Birks), some wrongs being essentially defined in reference to a protected interest and others to a degree of fault. This causes real and significant trouble, as illustrated perhaps most clearly by the case of Spring v. Guardian. While a mere taxonomical rearrangement of the underlying law could not, in itself, cure these defects, straightening out the ‘props’ along which the law grows would make it possible to sort out, in time, the existing conflicts. Possible objections, both theoretical and practical, to the proposed reorganisation of the law are addressed in this chapter.

This chapter asserts that the Prison Radio Association (PRA) experience illustrates the problematic relationship between mainstream media and prison practice. It uses the PRA position to examine the interplay between media and public opinion, and the resulting impact on criminal justice policy and practice. The issues are then explored more fully through the analysis of three contemporary newspaper stories which PRA founders identify as impacting on the organisation's early approach to managing outside media attention. The examples from the Guardian, the Daily Mail, and The Sun newspapers illustrate the codependent relationship between mass media coverage, populist politics, and perceived public opinion when it comes to the issue of crime and punishment.

This chapter discusses the history of The Angel Guardian Home, Ed Rohs' first institution and one of the many institutions for children founded by the Sisters of Mercy that began as an orphanage and that today facilitates adoption and the reunification of biological families. The chapter includes reminiscences of Sr. Johanna, a beloved Sister of Mercy who was responsible for Ed in his earliest years and who remained a guiding force in his life; a visit to Ed's second institution, the Convent of Mercy, a magnificent convent that was closed after 146 years of continuous service to the community; and Ed's fortuitous meeting with Sr. Johanna's sister, Katherine McCarthy, who would become his “Aunt Katherine”, a loving surrogate parent.

In 1991 Tony Harrison was commissioned by Alan Rusbridger, then editor of the Guardian, to write two poems on the Gulf War. The result was ‘Initial Illumination’ and ‘’A Cold Coming’. in 1995, the newspaper sent Harrison to Bosnia to send poems based on his eye-witnessing of the war, resulting in The Cycles of Donji Vakuf. In 2003, the invasion of Iraq produced two new war poems: Iraquatrains and Baghdad Lullaby. Armitstead, herself a Guardian journalist, sets these important poems in their historical and cultural contexts, and argues that the relationship between poet and paper was unique and unlikely to be repeated in the foreseeable future..

This chapter analyses the physicality of the referent and the documentary expression in the media. It explores some aspects of the proto-pictorial quality of documentary expression in writing and compares it with that in painting, to which notions of documentary can be applied only with some awkwardness. The chapter also examines how the photographic image works within its distinctive alignments of the pictorial and the physical. It evaluates three written documents, including George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm and the The Guardian newspaper's reporting of the September 11 terrorist attacks the following day.

The Colored Orphan Asylum (COA) trustees were determined that their new home in Riverdale would be modeled on the cottage system, which was then in vogue. The New York Juvenile Asylum had embraced the cottage system in 1897 as a way to enforce discipline and “to stimulate the intimacy of family life.” The Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Orphan Asylum in nearby Westchester County, New York, preferred young cottage mothers who had pedagogical training or kindergarten training. The Carson and Ellis College in Philadelphia provided white girls with a complete unit of family life, with kitchen, dining room, and common room. However, not all agreed that the housemothers should be African Americans. Mrs. J. L. Chapin questioned the advisability of employing black housemothers. Despite the initial inconveniences, at the end of 1907 the ladies were pleased with the cottage system, which represented a return to the early days of the asylum and its emphasis on a closely knit home environment.

This chapter deals with the writings of some of the British visitors to Russia, including John Cournos, the modernist writer, who produced an early anti-Bolshevik pamphlet; Robert Wilton, the anti-Semitic correspondent for the Times, and Michael Farbman, correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, who offered highly contrasting early accounts; Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells, whose accounts were distinguished by the cultural status of their authors, the latter much noted for an interview with Lenin; and Francis McCullagh, the former journalist, now British officer and agent taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks, who offered quite contrasting perspectives to those of the official visitors.

From confidentiality, contact notification, and disclosure to decisional capacity, advance directives, and end-of-life care, AIDS presents special bioethical challenges to caregivers. Stigma, fear of rejection, and discrimination play significant roles in the bioethical aspects of the care of persons with HIV and AIDS. As a consequence, caregivers are often faced with bioethical dilemmas and conflicts. While many persons with HIV and AIDS are comfortable with disclosure to partners and family members, some persons with HIV refuse to disclose their serostatus even to sexual partners. Many persons with HIV and AIDS are able, especially with support, to come to safer and healthier decisions about disclosure and about their health and medical care. In this chapter, we will explore these dilemmas and provide suggestions on how to deal with them. Strategies for dealing with ethical dilemmas, determining decisional capacity, addressing end-of-life issues, and maintaining confidentiality in the care of persons with HIV and AIDS are also presented. To begin a discussion of ethics as applied to clinical care, it is important to define the terms used in this context. The definitions of the terms used in this chapter are based not only on formal definitions as published in bioethics texts and articles but also their use in common medical practice. Table 13.1 provides definitions of some of the bioethics terms that are relevant to this discussion. Within the doctor–patient relationship, physicians are expected to understand and relate to their patients as their own primary decision-makers. Patients are presumed to be autonomous and to have decisional capacity. However, at times, decisional capacity can be called into question, such as when a medical condition impairs the patient’s capacity to understand the illness or results in impaired judgment. Since autonomy is such a protected right, multiple criteria must be fulfilled in order to substitute another person’s judgment for that of the patient in cases where the patient is unable to make an appropriate decision for him- or herself. This assessment is called an assessment for capacity and is specific for each decision—a separate assessment must be performed for each decision to be made if the patient’s decision-making ability is under question.

Romain Rolland wrote his first letter to Tagore on 10 April 1919 from Villeneuve, Switzerland, requesting him to sign the historical Declaration of the Independence of the Spirit. Tagore responded immediately. From a formal beginning, they quickly became close friends and exchanged 56 letters and telegrams till 1940. This correspondence also includes Tagore’s crucial letter to Manchester Guardian on 5 August 1926 after the Tagore–Mussolini controversy. Additionally, it includes letters by Rathindranath Tagore, Anil Chanda, and others. Tagore’s last letter was written from ‘Uttarayan’, Santiniketan to Rolland in Vézelay, France on 10 April 1940. The correspondence also has the English translation of Tagore’s poem, ‘Praved’, sent to Rolland expressing the similarities and differences between the two.

As the nineteenth century was the age of iron and the twentieth belonged to silicon, the present century will be identified with carbon. CO2 is the iconic greenhouse gas, imprinted on our vocabulary with talk of carbon footprints and allowances and offsets. For synthetic biologists, however, the carbon debacle has counterintuitively positioned this debased element as our savior. The future they foresee will supplant grimy factories of concrete and steel with clean colonies of living cells. To use the terminology of Freeman Dyson, gray technology will be replaced by green. Among the most celebrated physicists of the twentieth century, Dyson has become one of the foremost promoters of synthetic biology, a field that technologically is to genetic engineering what genetic engineering is to crop cultivation. Conceptually the distinction is even more radical than that: whereas genetic engineering merely modifies preexisting creatures more precisely than selective breeding, synthetic biology aims to fabricate entirely new organisms from nonliving materials. Unconstrained by genetic history, these artificial life forms can be intelligently designed to produce fuels or pharmaceuticals with unprecedented efficiency. The sheer audacity of synthetic biology lends itself to hyperbole, aptly captured in a 2007 Nature editorial: “For the first time, God has competition.” Yet the language of synthetic biology, also known as bioengineering, hardly bespeaks a cosmic paradigm shift. DNA constructed at a so-called gene foundry gives specialized function to a generic cell referred to as a chassis. A Victorian industrialist would have no trouble following the metaphoric language. He might even find work as a bioengineering consultant: the quaint iron age phrasing reflects the old-fashioned framework underlying this brave new discipline. After all, radical as artificial life may be philosophically—and significant as it may be environmentally—it’s technically just a strenuous construction project, with manufacturing challenges akin to building a bridge or a steam engine. That may explain why one of the most successful synthetic biologists working today, the Stanford University professor Drew Endy, trained as a civil engineer. Together with colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Endy has methodically approached synthetic biology as a problem of developing reliable building blocks and assembly protocols.

On the day that the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine was released, the publication’s technology director searched the web for the word crowdsourcing, the subject of an article by contributing writer Jeff Howe. He took a screenshot of what he found, a total of three brief mentions, and forwarded it to the author, advising that Howe save it as a “historical document.” Howe didn’t have to wait long to see history in action. Within nine days Google was returning 182,000 hits. Nor was it a fleeting fad. Three years later the number had multiplied to 1,620,000, with regular appearances in the mainstream media, from the Washington Post to Fox News, where crowdsourcing was averaging two hundred new mentions each month. There’s a simple explanation for the neologism’s success. Howe had detected a trend and given it a word. The backstory, which Howe posted on his personal blog, crowdsourcing.com, supports this notion: In January Wired asked me to give a sort of “reporter’s notebook” style presentation to some executives. I had recently been looking into common threads behind the ways advertising agencies, TV networks and newspapers were leveraging user-generated content, and picked that for my topic. Later that day I called my editor at Wired, Mark Robinson, and told him I thought there was a broader story that other journalists were missing, ie, that users weren’t just making dumbpet-trick movies, but were poised to contribute in significant and measurable ways in a disparate array of industries. In what Howe characterizes as “a fit of back-and-forth wordplay,” he and Robinson came up with a term that riffed off the title of a business book popular at the time, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, while also suggesting opensource software and corporate outsourcing. When “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” was finally published six months later, the last of these three roots was explicitly evoked in the teaser: “Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.”

Europeans Often Regard America as a country of bigness: big people, big cars, big houses. People we have already touched on; cars will come. American housing standards do fall in the upper half—but still well within— the European scale. Two rooms per inhabitant is the U.S. average. Residents of Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the UK, and Belgium have more (figure 88) The Irish have a higher percentage of their households occupying at least five rooms, the English and Spanish are very close runners-up. For social or public housing, transatlantic discrepancies pale before even more impressive disparities within Europe itself. Approximately a fifth of all accommodation in England and France is public housing, but those are by far the highest figures in Europe. In Italy, it is only 7%. In Spain, the fraction of the public housing stock of all dwellings is even less than in the United States, namely 1%. According to figures from the OECD, social housing scarcely exists at all in Portugal, at least to judge from the sums the government spends on it. Sweden, a country with a somewhat smaller population, spends well over 500 times as much. In any case, the range of state spending on housing in those nations with figures high enough to register as a fraction of GDP varies from 0.1% in Austria and Luxembourg to 14 times that in the UK. It is hard to call a penchant for social housing a defining European characteristic. Moreover, despite the absence of much public housing in the United States, the poorest fifth of tenants in America pay less of their income for housing than their peers in Sweden or Switzerland, and only a bit more than in the UK. America is oft en considered a stingy helper of Third World nations in distress. It is true that American foreign aid, in the form of direct cash grants, is not impressive if measured per capita. Nor is that of Austria or the Mediterranean nations, except France, which are all lower (figure 89).

If We Turn To The Environment and its protection, the contrasts between the United States and Europe are less stark than the debates over Kyoto and global warming suggest. Popular attitudes across the Atlantic appear to be quite comparable. A smaller percentage of Americans than any Europeans are fearful that current population trends are unsustainable. The percentage that fears strongly that modern life harms the environment is at the lower end of a very broad European spectrum. But a higher percentage of Americans than anyone other than the gloomy Portuguese are very worried about the environment. Already long before Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth, proportionately more Americans considered global warming extremely dangerous than do the Dutch, Norwegians, Danes, and Finns. Relatively more Americans than anyone but the Swiss claim to be very willing to pay higher prices to protect the environment. Proportionately more Americans than any Europeans are prepared to pay higher taxes for the sake of nature. Americans also claim willingness more than anyone other than the Swiss and the Swedes to accept a cut in living standards to achieve such ends. A higher percentage of Americans think that government should pass laws to protect the environment than the British, Swiss, Dutch, Germans, and all Scandinavians other than the Danes. American executives are more convinced that complying with government environmental standards helps their businesses’ long-term competitiveness than their colleagues in Germany, Iceland, Austria, Luxembourg, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Spain, or Portugal. In a recent comparative ranking of environmental policy conducted by Yale and Columbia universities, the score assigned the United States was not impressive. But that of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Greece was worse. The Achilles’ heel of America’s environmental policy is its energy inefficiency, which is partly related to the size of the country and the extremities of its weather. On most other measures, U.S. rankings are better

Even On Religion, there is reason to question the usual stereotypes of an absolute polarity between the United States and Europe. Let us leave aside the extent to which secularizing Europe is the outlier in a religious world, not the United States. There are religious contrasts, to be sure, between America and Europe, but they are neither as stark nor undifferentiated as is oft en thought. It is frequently said that Americans are more religious than Europeans. These things are hard to quantify, but there is certainly data pointing in that direction. In 1999, a smaller percentage of Americans (1.4%) described themselves as atheists than did Europeans—by a small margin, with the Irish and the Austrians almost indistinguishably close to the Americans (figure 174). But then again, no European country except France (with 14.2%) has more than 8% avowed atheists. The Americans are closer (less than one standard deviation below) to the European mean than are the French, who are more than three standard deviations above it. A smaller percentage of Americans consider themselves religious than the Portuguese and Italians. Proportionately fewer Americans say they believe in God and always have than the Irish and Portuguese, and only a few more than the Italians. A higher percentage of Americans firmly believes in God than northern Europeans, but the numbers are broadly comparable with the Catholic countries (figure 175). If the qualifier “firm” is removed, the American figures become much the same as the Mediterranean nations and, of course, Ireland (figure 176). Again, the United States is closer to the European mean (1.6 standard deviations above) than is the nonbelieving extreme, Sweden, at 1.9 standard deviations below it. Percentage-wise, more Americans (16.4%) attend church more than once a week than in any European nation (Ireland: 13.3%). But fewer Americans, by far, attend church on a weekly basis than the Irish, and the Portuguese and Italians attend at the same rate. The American figure for weekly church attendance is only about as far above the European mean (1.2 standard deviations) as the Danish result (1.07 standard deviations) is below it (figure 177). Over a quarter of Americans report never attending church, the same as the Finns, compared to only 12% of Italians.