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Thomas Cook started it all with his meticulously organized archaeological tours up the Nile. He harnessed the revolutionary technologies of Victorian travel to a growing desire on the part of the middle class to explore the world and its ancient history. Cook was the first to realize the potential of the railroad for group tours. A devout Baptist and an advocate for temperance, he began his business by organizing rail excursions to temperance meetings in nearby towns in central England. The enterprise was so successful that he took advantage of steamships and continental railroads to organize what we now call package tours to France and Germany. From that, it was not much more difficult to organize tours to Egypt and the Holy Land, now readily accessible thanks to the new technology for Victorian travel: the railroad, the steamship, and the telegraph. Then, in the twentieth century, came ocean liners, massive cruise ships, and the Boeing 707, followed by the jumbo jet, all of which together made archaeological travel part of popular culture. We live in a completely accessible world of intricate airline schedules and instant communication, where you can visit the great moiae of Easter Island as easily as you can take a journey to Stonehenge or the Parthenon, the difference being a longer flight and the need for the correct visas and a foreign rental car at the other end. And if you become sick or injured, you can be evacuated from most places within hours: Peter Fleming or Ella Maillart would have been in real trouble had they become sick or injured in the vast expanses of central Asia. We forget that to travel east of the Holy Land was considered highly adventurous until after World War II, and that central Asia was virtually inaccessible to outsiders until the late twentieth century. Much of the adventure of archaeological travel has vanished since the 1960s in a tidal wave of mass tourism and its attendant businesses. Leisure travel is now the world’s largest industry, and the mainstay of many national economies, including that of Egypt, where at last count six mil-lion tourists visit each year. According to Statistics Canada, global cultural tourism will grow at a rate of about 15 percent annually through the year 2010.

This chapter focuses on the diachronic and synchronic relation between language and space, critically considering some of the most important advances made within Romance linguistic geography and dialectometry. It reviews the early work of the dialect geographers in recording regional variation by means of detailed linguistic atlases and in tracing dialect areas, while reflecting upon the linguistic nature of the major discontinuities and their historical significance in explaining the fragmentation of Latin. The second part of the chapter concentrates on more recent taxometric and cartographic achievements of dialectometry in its quantitative investigations and interpretations of traditional linguistic atlases, exploring the non-coincidence of single areas and their surrounding isoglosses; difficulties in measuring the data of linguistic atlases; integration of quantitative methods with traditional qualitative geolinguistics; discovery of lower and higher ranking structural patterns concealed in traditional presentations of atlas data; and cartographic exploitation of similarity and distance matrices.

The 2008 meeting of the American Psychopathological Association was framed by a very challenging topic: causality. Indeed, setting aside any possible application in understanding psychopathology, causality is a deep concept—a fact that has kept philosophers gainfully employed for some time now. One thing is clear, however, at least in the behavioral sciences: If one wants to make credible causal claims, it helps to be able to directly manipulate the variables of interest. Indeed, some would go so far as to say that causality cannot be inferred without this kind of experimental manipulation. Through manipulation, one can systematically vary a variable of interest, while holding others constant, including the observational conditions. Consider, for example, how this is conveyed to new students in the behavioral sciences in a very useful text by Stanovich (2007). Stanovich (2007) first reviews the classic observation that simply knowing that two things (A and B) tend to occur together more often than one would expect by chance (a correlation) is not enough evidence to conclude that those two things have some sort of causal relationship (e.g., A causes B). To really claim that A causes B, ‘‘the investigator manipulates the variable hypothesized to be the cause and looks for an effect on the variable hypothesized to be the effect while holding all other variables constant by control and randomization’’ (p. 102). The implications of this experimental perspective on causality for psychopathology research are readily apparent: The situation is nearly hopeless, at least in terms of getting at the original, antecedent, distal causes of psychopathology. It is axiomatically unethical to manipulate variables to enhance the likelihood of psychopathology; we cannot directly manipulate things to create psychopathology in persons who do not already suffer from psychopathology. This is not to say that, once psychopathology is present, experimental designs are not fundamentally helpful in understanding the mechanisms underlying its expression. Indeed, the discipline of experimental psychopathology is founded on this premise, involving comparisons of the behaviors of persons with psychopathology and persons without psychopathology under precisely controlled conditions.