Aristocratic Subjectivity in Revolutionary Turmoil

Childbirth in aristocratic households of Heian Japan.

This paper focuses on childbirth in Japan's aristocratic households during the Heian period (794-1185). Drawing on various sources, including court diaries, visual sources, literary records, and Japan's first medical collection, with its assortment of gynaecological and obstetric prescriptions, as well as Buddhist and other ritual texts, this short excursion into the cultural history of childbi...

Extremism in revolutionary movements

A revolutionary entrepreneur strategically chooses the revolutionary agenda to maximize the likelihood of revolution. Citizens have different preferences and can contribute varying degrees of support. This presents the revolutionary entrepreneur with a tradeoff between extensive and intensive margins of support. We show: (1) Extremists exert a disproportionate influence over the revolutionary a...

Revolutionary Science

On rare occasions in the history of science, remarkable discoveries transform human society and forever alter mankind's view of the world. Examples of such discoveries include the heliocentric theory, Newtonian physics, the germ theory of disease, quantum theory, plate tectonics and the discovery that DNA carries genetic information. The science philosopher Thomas Kuhn famously described scienc...

Revolutionary Algorithms

The optimization of dynamic problems is both widespread and difficult. When conducting dynamic optimization, a balance between reinitialization and computational expense has to be found. There are multiple approaches to this. In parallel genetic algorithms, multiple sub-populations concurrently try to optimize a potentially dynamic problem. But as the number of sub-population increases, their e...

The Classless Turmoil