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The ultimate goal in animal experimentation is not necessarily to eliminate all experiments, but rather to establish a benign ethic for its practice. An interim ethic is described, which includes changes in current animal legislation, specifically with regard to the Animal Welfare Act. Paying attention to animal husbandry conditions and utilizing preference tests can go a long way in establishing a more humane practice of animal experimentation. Finally, the idea of pet keeping is offered as a model for treating experimental animals much as we would pets. The result would be a movement away from simply an instrumental and often harmful use of animals, to one which is based on the intrinsic value of animals.

The history of Australian electoral systems shows a high degree of democratic experimentation. Australia employs the alternative vote to elect its lower house of parliament, and the single transferable vote to elect the upper house. In addition, the adoption of compulsory voting has consequences for the operation of those electoral systems. Political culture reflects a high degree of delegation by voters to political parties, and electoral reform is not high on the political agenda.

While the number of people involved in new religious movements (NRMs) is small, the attention they have received in the popular media and academic discourse suggest a greater significance. In the popular media, NRMs are most often seen as a social problem. In academic studies, they are more often associated with processes of social change and the critique of modernity. In the literature, there are four interpretive frameworks for understanding the significance of NRMs when viewed as a response to the social conditions of modernity. The first sees them as part of the protest against modernity. The second sees them as forums for modern social experimentation. The third identifies them with the re-enchantment of the modern world. The fourth suggests they are born of attempts to adapt to the social and psychological tensions created by a dialectic of trust and risk in late modern societies.

The ethical treatment of animals in general, and in particular the issue of animal experimentation, continues to be a disputed moral issue. This chapter surveys the history of the use of animals in experimentation, beginning with the ancient Greek period and going through the contemporary era. It presents the history of experimentation as well the eventual opposition to it on the part of some. The chapter concludes by laying out how the book will proceed, which addresses the following topics: animal legislation, animal minds, animal sentience, animal rights, Christian theology and its perspective on animals, and the burdens and benefits of animal experimentation.

Chapter 6 details a power-laden and affective symbol, metaphor, poetic and musical sign in Pamir culture that is central to concepts of health and healing. This is done through poetic and musical analysis that shows the pervasiveness and centrality of this local sign, which is manifest in local belief, the natural and built environment, and the musical and poetic structure of maddâh devotional music. A physiological experiment that was conducted in the context of maddâh ritual performance is presented and statistical data analyzed and interpreted showing a significant downward modulation of systolic blood pressure at p-value of .0003. Further, the culture-transcendent aspects are applied in another research project in the U.S. among a culturally diverse group of people (ages 18-85) where participants learn to create health, healing, or transformation through practices of music, sound, vocalization, and meditation. The GAP — Guided Attention Practice is presented as part of this latter research project.

This chapter is an overview of Yeltsin's economic reforms, with a focus on the financial markets and banks associated with privatization. The architects of Russian reform hoped that private activity could be rapidly and irreversibly severed from the polity such that a “depoliticized” market would quickly fill the void left by the rapid destruction of the state planning system. In contrast, the emergence of a new market system actually evolved through a gradual process of economic experimentation and political settlement where the domains of states and markets were inextricably intertwined. Market reform policies helped dismantle the economic and political structures of the Soviet regime, but they did not dictate what emerged in its place.

Advances in sampling and observation are described including new optical and acoustical systems together with animal tagging and telemetry. Shipboard, laboratory, and in situ studies of zooplankton feeding, reproduction and development, zooplankton and larval fish growth, and zooplankton mortality are reviewed. The relation between individual zooplankton behaviours, such as feeding, predator escape and mate‐finding, are considered in relation to population processes. Methods of retrospective data analysis applied in retrospective studies on past ecosystem states are described. Finally, potential future directions for marine ecosystem research using observational and experimental approaches are discussed.

This chapter examines some of the tensions among animal welfare, animal rights, and environmental protection ethics. It explains that while animal rights advocates object to animal experimentation, this practice is acceptable to those who believe in animal welfare. The chapter shows that those who believe in environmental ethics might support the hunting of deer and rabbits when this is necessary to protect ecological well-being. It proposes an alternative approach to understanding the evaluative claims of the three perspectives, called rational attitude theory of value.

This chapter presents Reich's short piece about György Ligeti, for the program of a concert of Ligeti's music given by the Ensemble Sospeso in New York City, on March 25, 2000. Reich, like almost everyone else, always had a high regard for Ligeti's music. He considers Atmosphères an amazing piece, which defines huge clusters as a compositional technique. It is not an experiment but a superbly realized masterpiece.

This chapter discusses ethical issues and policies relating to the protection of vulnerable subjects in research. It reviews the history of human experimentation with vulnerable human subjects such as people with impaired decision-making capacities, children, fetuses, and subordinate populations (i.e., prisoners, students, employees, and soldiers). It discusses the definition of vulnerability as well as the criteria for decision-making capacity. The chapter also examines the federal regulations and the special safeguards, or lack thereof, currently available to protect vulnerable populations, and it discusses different types of research with children and examines the concept of minimal risk.

With Chapter 9 attention switches to Shakespeare. It is argued that Shakespeare began his career as an historical dramatist by composing a series of plays which open in the apocalyptic key of Foxe's Actes and Monuments, but that that apocalyptic mode was gradually rendered unsustainable by the difficult historiographical terrain of the Wars of the Roses. The result was that, by the time he had completed 3 Henry VI, Shakespeare had exhausted the model of the history play with which he had begun, and was in consequence forced to cast about for a new blueprint for historical drama.

The three history plays Shakespeare composed next—Richard III, King John, and Richard II—constitute a period of experimentation, in which we see the playwright searching for a mode of historical drama which could replace the exhausted mode of apocalypse. These three plays all (albeit in different ways) reveal formal experiment precipitating and accompanying politically heterodox insights into the nature of such key political concepts as legitimacy, obligation, and resistance. This phase of formal and political restlessness, although in itself unsatisfactory, was crucial in paving the way towards the more assured plays which followed.

The book's proper narrative commences in this chapter. Into the 18th century's preponderantly theoretic disposition to prize or illustrate epic as a fixed idea or classic form, the Revolution in France sent shock waves that galvanized literary experimentation in Britain. Poets of the 1790s rebuilt epic from used and jury-rigged parts, in a process that favored specimen or torso models and that the chapter brings into focus around the issue of ‘machinery’. How did the angelic or allegorical machines in these epic thinkers' improvised prototypes drive the reinvented genre, and to what end? Unresolved yet productive tension between romance plots and standard epic patterns brought forth radical initiatives from Darwin and Blake, and generated the decade's farthest-reaching work by Landor and Southey.