bare life Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory
...life lived. Bare life refers then to a conception of life in which the sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is lived, by which Agamben means its possibilities and potentialities. Suggestions made in 2008 by Scotland Yard and the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain that children as young as five should be DNA typed and their details placed in a database if they exhibit behavioural signs indicating future criminal activity is a perfect example of what Agamben means by bare life. It reduces the prospects of the life of...
bare life Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...life lived. Bare life refers then to a conception of life in which the sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is lived, by which Agamben means its possibilities and potentialities. Suggestions made in 2008 by Scotland Yard and the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain that children as young as five should be DNA typed and their details placed in a database if they exhibit behavioural signs indicating future criminal activity is a perfect example of what Agamben means by bare life. It reduces the prospects of the life of...
demography of the war Reference library
J. M. Winter
The Oxford Companion to World War II
...the boundary between civilian and military targets in warfare was obliterated. In Asia, as throughout occupied Europe, disease, famine, and indiscriminate bombardment of civilian populations produced a parallel human disaster, the dimensions of which can never be fully known. The bare outlines of this catastrophe are presented in Table 1. Over half of the 50 million men, women , and children who perished in the Second World War were civilians. Demography, Table 1: Approximate war-related deaths of major combatant nations in the Second World War Country...
Canada Reference library
J. L. Granatstein
The Oxford Companion to World War II
...Thus when the federal election was held on 11 June 1945 , fortuitously after the war in Europe had ended and before Canada's promise of a division for the Pacific war had time to be implemented. King's government was re-elected with 41% of the popular vote and 125 seats, a bare majority. In Quebec, however, King won 53 of 65 seats and, as one academic noted in an election analysis, ‘Quebec Saves Our King’. It was precisely true, though the Liberals did win more seats outside Quebec than any other party. 4. Canada–US relations Before the outbreak of the...
Clooth-na-Bare Quick reference
A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology
...Bare . W. B. Yeats's transmogrification of Cailleach Bhéirre . Unlike her predecessor in Irish tradition, Clooth-na-Bare is not a sovereignty figure. Instead, she seeks the deepest lake in which to drown her fairy life as she has grown weary of...
succession Quick reference
A Dictionary of Geography (5 ed.)
... ( plant succession ) A series of complexes of plant life at a particular site. Plant succession is viewed as the development of plant life on originally bare earth, in a definite sequence; see Leal and Lorscheitter (2007) Acta Bot. Bras. 21, 1 . The term successional dynamics applies to the shifts between successional stages of an ecosystem...
Recapitulation Reference library
Encyclopedia of Evolution
...of von Baer and to the notion of divergence in the embryonic history. Then, in 1859 and following his reading of T. H. Huxley's translation of von Baer, Darwin also noted the importance of studying development for evidence of the animal's ancestral characteristics. After all, the divergence von Baer had discussed was remarkably similar to the descent by modification that Charles, Darwin envisioned. Darwin's epochal book On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859 . In it, Darwin carefully developed his new interpretation of animal life, emphasizing...
Baring-Gould, Sabine (1834–1924) Quick reference
A Dictionary of English Folklore
...valuable and authoritative notes on the songs and often on the performers of bygone days. Baring-Gould left a mass of material when he died and his vast manuscripts are only now being identified and made available. DNB ; Bickford H. C. Dickinson , Sabine Baring-Gould: Squarson, Writer and Folklorist (1970); Harold Kirk-Smith , Now the Day is Over: The Life and Times of Sabine Baring-Gould (1997); William E. Purcell , Onward Christian Soldier: A Life of Sabine Baring-Gould ...
evergreen Quick reference
A Dictionary of Ecology (5 ed.)
...Applied to a tree or shrub that has persistent leaves, and whose crown is never wholly bare. Although the entire plant remains green throughout the year, each leaf has a limited life span, but is physically tougher and usually longer-lived than a deciduous leaf. Evergreen leaves have the advantage that where nutrients such as nitrogen are in short supply their longer life span allows a more efficient use of the limited...
Snowball Earth Quick reference
A Dictionary of Geography (5 ed.)
...have actually frozen over, resembling a ‘snowball’, and potentially causing some of the most severe crises in the history of life on the planet. Such episodes may have been triggered by a reduction in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, principally CO 2 (carbon dioxide) and CH 4 (methane). This would have made the global climate colder, creating larger areas of ice and snow. This ice and snow reflects more solar radiation than does bare ground or liquid water, which creates a ‘positive feedback’. If the Earth ever became approximately half-covered by ice or...
Vaughan Williams, Ralph (1872–1958) Quick reference
A Dictionary of English Folklore
...He was primarily interested in the tunes and often failed to note more than the first verse of a text. He did not try to note the whole repertoire of a singer, but concentrated on those he found interesting, and neither did he record any details of the singer's life or attitudes to singing beyond the bare name, age, and occupation. Collecting songs at that time was an arduous business, getting to remote villages (often by bicycle), spending hours searching out singers, noting tunes and words by hand in the open air or pub taprooms. The fact that Vaughan...
Heracles (Europe) Quick reference
A Dictionary of World Mythology
... Europe Or the Roman Hercules. The greatest of the heroes in Greek mythology. Son of the Theban Alcmene and Zeus. Heracles' life was shaped by the animosity of Hera, who pursued him with relentless hostility. She drove him mad so that he killed his own family. To expiate this dreadful crime he undertook the famous twelve labours. They were: the killing of the Nemean lion, a feat he achieved with his bare hands; the killing of the Hydra, a nine-headed dragon sacred to Hera; the capture of the Arcadian stag; the killing of the Erymanthian boar; the...
Kidson, Frank (1855–1926) Quick reference
A Dictionary of English Folklore
...Frank ( 1855–1926 ). Born and living for most of his life in Leeds, he was proud of his home town and Yorkshire roots, and made a modest living as a journalist and author. Along with Lucy Broadwood and Sabine Baring-Gould he formed part of an important generation of pre- Folk Song Society song enthusiasts whose early collecting activities were undertaken more or less in isolation but whose individual efforts, and first publications, became both standard works and catalysts for the movement which included the formation of the Society in 1898 , and...
Erosion Reference library
Encyclopedia of Global Change
...it becomes concentrated into flow paths, its velocity increases, and it is able to cut small channels or rills into the land surface. Dense rill networks can be formed on bare farmland during intense rainstorms; they are also a feature of slopes left bare of vegetation for several months at a time, such as road cuttings, embankments, industrial sites, and residential areas left bare while construction work is in progress. In many situations, rill channels do not cut very deeply because the underlying material is less weathered, more compact, and therefore...
American myths Reference library
The Oxford Companion to World Mythology
...the ground. A similar hero was Joe Magarac , a steelworker who made rails for the railroad by squeezing white-hot steel with his bare hands. Sometimes the “tall tales,” as they are called, were exaggerations of the deeds of real people, again to emphasize American values. John Henry was an African American railroad worker, a modern-day Herakles who was said to have won a drilling race against a steam drill at the cost of his life. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were real people whose lives were turned into tall tales. Crockett, a sometime congressman who...
Development Reference library
Encyclopedia of Evolution
...ideas for his evolutionary theories from von Baer. These included (1) a branching versus linear form of descent, (2) the idea that similar structures reveal common descent, and (3) the idea of using embryonic forms in classification. Because differences in adult form arise during development, von Baer's laws also led Darwin to see that the predictable similarities between the embryonic forms of different groups of organisms were strong support for his theory of evolution. Together, the ideas of von Baer, Schleiden and Schwann, and Darwin formed the...
Building Decay Reference library
Encyclopedia of Global Change
...the service life of many building materials. Allied with other good environmental management practices, such as the improvement of air quality, better management of groundwater resources, and reduction of traffic-related impacts such as de-icing salt applications, such strategies should help to conserve buildings and engineering structures by reducing materials decay. See also Air Quality . Addleson, L. , and C. Rice . Performance of Materials in Buildings . Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, 1991. A readable summary of important properties. Baer, N. S. , and ...
Erosion Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Global Change
...runoff over the land surface is reduced. The percentage of the annual rainfall contributing to runoff varies from less than 1% in densely vegetated areas to nearly 60% in urban areas and on bare soil. By determining the fate of the rainfall, the vegetation cover directly influences the erosion by raindrop impact and surface runoff. Raindrop Impact Raindrop impact on bare soil is a powerful agent of particle detachment. Norman Hudson ( 1934–1996 ) carried out a simple but classic experiment in the 1950s in Zimbabwe to show the importance of covering the soil...
Food Trucks Reference library
Sophia V. Schweitzer
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (2 ed.)
...Trucks Quite simply, food trucks are mobile venues that sell food. This is nothing new. By way of carts, wagons, and trucks, creative entrepreneurs have been peddling sandwiches and prepackaged or easy-to-prepare meals for decades. Vehicles would be equipped with anything from bare counter space to fryers and compact kitchens. Today's food truck, however, uses blogs and social media such as Twitter to elevate street food into a gourmet class of its own. Meeting the nation's growing preference for affordable, easily accessible foods made with quality...
Guizhou Province (2007) Reference library
Ronald David HILL
Berkshire Encyclopedia of China
...(68,000 square miles, about the size of Uruguay), of which only 4,900 square kilometers (1,982 square miles) are under cultivation. Much land is habitable only at low densities or not at all. About 75 percent of the land is hills and mountains, mostly limestone. About 3 percent is bare rock. So limited is agricultural land that each acre must support twenty farm people. Each acre, even on slopes, must be cropped, on average, 1.8 times a year. Population pressure results in 40 percent of the total land being seriously eroded. About 63 percent of Guizhou’s workers...
