Ferdinand III played a crucial role both in helping to end the Thirty Years' War and in re-establishing Habsburg sovereignty within his hereditary lands, and yet he remains one of the most neglected of all Habsburg emperors. The underlying premise of Sacred Music as Public Image for Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III is that Ferdinand's accomplishments came not through diplomacy or strong leadership but primarily through a skillful manipulation of the arts, through which he communicated important messages to his subjects and secured their allegiance to the Catholic Church. An important locus for cultural activity at court, especially as related to the Habsburgs' political power, was the Emperor's public image. Ferdinand III offers a fascinating case study in monarchical representation, for the war necessitated that he revise the image he had cultivated at the beginning of his reign, that of a powerful, victorious warrior. Weaver argues that by focusing on the patronage of sacred music (rather than the more traditional visual and theatrical means of representation), Ferdinand III was able to uphold his reputation as a pious Catholic reformer and subtly revise his triumphant martial image without sacrificing his power, while also achieving his Counter-Reformation goal of unifying his hereditary lands under the Catholic church. Drawing upon recent methodological approaches to the representation of other early modern monarchs, as well as upon the theory of confessionalization, this book places the sacred vocal music composed by imperial musicians into the rich cultural, political, and religious contexts of mid-seventeenth-century Central Europe. The book incorporates dramatic productions such as opera, oratorio, and Jesuit drama (as well as works in other media), but the primary focus is the more numerous and more frequently performed Latin-texted paraliturgical genre of the motet, which has generally not been considered by scholars as a vehicle for monarchical representation. By examining the representation of this little-studied emperor during a crucial time in European history, this book opens a window into the unique world view of the Habsburgs, allowing for a previously untold narrative of the end of the Thirty Years' War as seen through the eyes of this important ruling family.

This book illustrates a pathway for knowledge production to benefit from interweaving the seemingly disparate historical experiences of Indigenous Peoples and computer science education. The resulting practice of ancestral computing for sustainability holds the power to mitigate the destructive forces of the field, while extending the potential of traditionally underserved and unheard populations. Reimagining the field of computer science, interwoven with traditional lifeways, presents compelling new discoveries in research and harnesses the rich tapestries that are Indigenous populations. Returning healthy lifeways to a center stage long-occupied by tightly controlled, Eurocentric learning methods opens worlds of opportunity that have felt lost to time.

Ancestral Diets and Nutrition supplies dietary advice based on the study of prehuman and human populations worldwide over the last two million years. This thorough, accessible book uses prehistory and history as a laboratory for testing the health effects of various foods. It examines all food groups by drawing evidence from skeletons and their teeth, middens, and coprolites along with written records where they exist to determine peoples’ health and diet. Fully illustrated and grounded in extensive research, this book enhances knowledge about diet, nutrition, and health. It appeals to practitioners in medicine, nutrition, anthropology, biology, chemistry, economics, and history, and those seeking a clear explanation of what humans have eaten across the ages and what we should eat now. Features: Sixteen chapters examine fat, sweeteners, grains, roots and tubers, fruits, vegetables, and animal and plant sources of protein. Integrates information about diet, nutrition, and health from ancient, medieval, modern and current sources, drawing from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Provides comprehensive coverage based on the study of several hundred sources and the provision of over 2,000 footnotes. Presents practical information to help shape readers’ next meal through recommendations of what to eat and what to avoid.

Web technologies are increasingly relevant to scientists working with data, for both accessing data and creating rich dynamic and interactive displays. The XML and JSON data formats are widely used in Web services, regular Web pages and JavaScript code, and visualization formats such as SVG and KML for Google Earth and Google Maps. In addition, scientists use HTTP and other network protocols to scrape data from Web pages, access REST and SOAP Web Services, and interact with NoSQL databases and text search applications. This book provides a practical hands-on introduction to these technologies, including high-level functions the authors have developed for data scientists. It describes strategies and approaches for extracting data from HTML, XML, and JSON formats and how to programmatically access data from the Web. Along with these general skills, the authors illustrate several applications that are relevant to data scientists, such as reading and writing spreadsheet documents both locally and via Google Docs, creating interactive and dynamic visualizations, displaying spatial-temporal displays with Google Earth, and generating code from descriptions of data structures to read and write data. These topics demonstrate the rich possibilities and opportunities to do new things with these modern technologies. The book contains many examples and case-studies that readers can use directly and adapt to their own work. The authors have focused on the integration of these technologies with the R statistical computing environment. However, the ideas and skills presented here are more general, and statisticians who use other computing environments will also find them relevant to their work. Deborah Nolan is Professor of Statistics at University of California, Berkeley. Duncan Temple Lang is Associate Professor of Statistics at University of California, Davis and has been a member of both the S and R development teams.

This book provides a theoretical background of branching processes and discusses their biological applications. Branching processes are a well-developed and powerful set of tools in the field of applied probability. The range of applications considered includes molecular biology, cellular biology, human evolution and medicine. The branching processes discussed include Galton-Watson, Markov, Bellman-Harris, Multitype, and General Processes. As an aid to understanding specific examples, two introductory chapters, and two glossaries are included that provide background material in mathematics and in biology. The book will be of interest to scientists who work in quantitative modeling of biological systems, particularly probabilists, mathematical biologists, biostatisticians, cell biologists, molecular biologists, and bioinformaticians. The authors are a mathematician and cell biologist who have collaborated for more than a decade in the field of branching processes in biology for this new edition. This second expanded edition adds new material published during the last decade, with nearly 200 new references. More material has been added on infinitely-dimensional multitype processes, including the infinitely-dimensional linear-fractional case. Hypergeometric function treatment of the special case of the Griffiths-Pakes infinite allele branching process has also been added. There are additional applications of recent molecular processes and connections with systems biology are explored, and a new chapter on genealogies of branching processes and their applications. Reviews of First Edition: "This is a significant book on applications of branching processes in biology, and it is highly recommended for those readers who are interested in the application and development of stochastic models, particularly those with interests in cellular and molecular biology." (Siam Review, Vol. 45 (2), 2003) “This book will be very interesting and useful for mathematicians, statisticians and biologists as well, and especially for researchers developing mathematical methods in biology, medicine and other natural sciences.” (Short Book Reviews of the ISI, Vol. 23 (2), 2003)

Kirikongo is an archaeological site composed of thirteen remarkably well-preserved discrete mounds occupied continually from the early first to the mid second millennium AD. It spans a dynamic era that saw the growth of large settlement communities and regional socio-political formations, development of economic specializations, intensification in interregional commercial networks, and the effects of the Black Death pandemic. The extraordinary preservation of architectural units, activity areas and industrial zones provides a unique opportunity to discern the cultural practices that created stratified mounds (tells) in this part of West Africa. Building from a new detailed zooarchaeological analysis and refinements in stratigraphic precision, this book argues that repeated ritual activity was a significant factor in the accumulation of stratified archaeological deposits. The book details consistencies in form and content of discrete loci containing animal bones, food remains, and broken and unbroken objects and suggests that these are the remnants of sequential ancestor shrines created when domestic spaces were converted to tombs or dedicated mortuary monuments were constructed. Continuities and transformations in ancestral rituals at Kirikongo inform on earlier West African ritual practices from the second millennium BC as well as political and social transformations at the site. More broadly, this case study provides new insights on anthropogenic mound (tell) formation processes, social zooarchaeology, material culture theory, historical ontology, and the analysis of ritual and religion in the archaeological record.

Since the beginning of critical scholarship, biblical texts have been dated using linguistic evidence. In recent years, this has been a controversial topic. However, until now, there has been no introduction to and comprehensive study of the field. Volume I introduces the field of linguistic dating of biblical texts, particularly to intermediate and advanced students of Biblical Hebrew with a reasonable background in the language, but also to scholars of the Hebrew Bibles in general who have not been exposed to the full scope of issues. It outlines topics at a basic level before entering into detailed discussion. Many text samples are presented for study, and readers are introduced to significant linguistic features of the texts through notes on the pages. Detailed notes on these text sample provide a background, concrete illustrations and a point of departure for discussion of the general and theoretical issues discussed in each chapter that will make this volume useful as a classroom textbook.