Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2012 August 27

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August 27

Audiobook for . . .

Hi I am searching desperately for an audio book version of:

Save the Males:Why men matter and why women should care by Kathleen Parker 2008

I have checked almost a dozen audio CD places and audiobook sites but so far no luck :-( thanks for any help! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.134.148.29 (talk) 00:48, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Do you have reason to believe that someone made an audio version? Dismas|^(talk) 01:47, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I know that some e-readers like Amazon Kindle have a text-to-speech function. It is a bit unnatural, as opposed to an actual audio book, but if there is nothing else, there is always that. --Jayron32 02:32, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Though it should be noted that — I believe — publishers can disable that functionality on a per-book basis at their whim. So it may not actually be an option. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:28, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Audiobooks are more common in fiction than in non-fiction - and especially more serious non-fiction - because there isn't a market for them. With a serious non-fiction book, people want to be able to mark it up, refer to footnotes, make copies, compare pages in chapters, etc. and that makes the audiobook format less appealing to readers. (I assume you're not looking for this book for a visually impaired person; if you are, check with your local "books for the blind" organization.) --NellieBly (talk) 05:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Questions about law in the Victorian period

I am currently writing a novel set in the Victorian era in Australia. I have checked out books on the subject and searched the Internet, but I can't find out particular information on the legal system of the time. First, what was the difference between murder and manslaughter then, if they differentiated it in the first place? And if they did, what was the difference in sentences? Also, when was the first time female lawyers appeared? Thank you for your help, I much appreciate it.Southernlegacy (talk) 01:11, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Prior to 1901, as I'm sure you know, Australia was a collection of crown colonies. According to that article, each colony had its own independent legal system, largely based on English Common law but adjustable according to local circumstances. I would expect that in most places, if not everywhere, the answer to your question about murder versus manslaughter would have been the same as for Common law. Regarding female lawyers I have no information, but it would surprise me if there were any during the Victorian era. Looie496 (talk) 03:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Doing some digging, I found some information on pioneering female lawyers. Ethel Benjamin was New Zealand's first practicing female lawyer, and started practicing in the late Victorian era. Mary Hall was an early American female lawyer, and she practised in the Victorian era (1880s-1890s). Canadian Clara Brett Martin is noted as the first female lawyer in the British Empire, she started practising shortly before Ethel Benjamin. I can't find any information on who the first female lawyer in Australia would have been, but in other Anglophone countries it seems that there were a small handful of female lawyers in the late Victorian era. --Jayron32 05:32, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

For your first question therefore, a good place to start would be Manslaughter in English law. Alansplodge (talk) 10:09, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

And some mention of manslaughter in 19th century Australia in Fault in Homicide: Towards a Schematic Approach to the Fault Elements for ... By Stanley Meng Heong Yeo (always assuming that Google Books lets you see this preview). Alansplodge (talk) 10:17, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Finally, the history of the concept of manslaughter in this paper which refers to Ireland, which too is based on the English system. Alansplodge (talk) 10:22, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Me again; it would seem that the relevant legislation in England, Wales and Ireland was the Offences against the Person Act 1861. A summary is here. Alansplodge (talk) 11:05, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

And, slightly related, is The Merchant of Venice, a fictional work yes, and pre-Victorian (by several centuries) but one which is decidedly relevent to the OPs question. --Jayron32 15:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Try the national library. Zoonoses (talk) 02:39, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Countercultures

Besides Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, is there any other countercultures articles on Wikipedia? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.95.107.242 (talk) 01:12, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Category:Counterculture (and its subcategories). AnonMoos (talk) 01:19, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Why does the United States have relatively more shootings than most developed countries?

Ever since that Colorado theater shooting last month, there has been a number of high-profile shootings, like that one at a Sikh temple and at the Empire State Building. But I was wondering – why? I know it's probably because of the lack of effective gun laws, but what are other possible reasons, especially psychological or political? While there are a few other countries like Canada that have more guns per people, murders and shootings aren't as common. In fact, I'm not aware of any developed country that has shootings as frequent as the US. Why does America have so many shootings in the first place? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 03:14, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

One reason that comes to my mind, obviously, is how the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution affects gun politics in the United States. However, as Gun politics in the United States#Rate of homicides by firearm points out, violent crime rates in the United States are lower than in other advanced countries. Of course, you have the American news media who frequently likes to sensationalize every such shooting, plastering news of them everywhere to make them more "high-profile" than they actually should be. Zzyzx11 (talk) 03:24, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Of course what counts as a violent crime varies from one country to another. As even the source for that paragraph in the US gun politics article (a report in the Daily Mail - whose entire raison d'être is to convince the English middle-classes that the country has gone to rack and ruin) concedes "In Britain, an affray is considered a violent crime, while in other countries it will only be logged if a person is physically injured." The statistic in that article that is surely more relevant here, as the question is why does America have so many more shootings, is the homicide rate by firearm:- (from the same article) 3.0 per 100,000 people in the US and 0.07 per 100,000 people in the UK. If we compare homicide rates (what counts as a homicide varies between jurisdictions but there is far less variance than the fairly nebulous term "violent crime"), the US has a homicide rate of 4.2, the UK 1.2, Canada 1.6, Australia 1.0, France 1.1, Germany 0.8 (homicides per 100,000 population). Further comparisons can be made at the homicide rate article, but to sum up, the US has a homicide rate that's 3 to 4 times higher than comparable countries. Valiantis (talk) 04:28, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

If you are referring to mass shootings, they aren't actually very common even in the US -- they are very salient because of all the news coverage they receive. Canada has only 1/10 the population of the US so it would be expected to have only a tenth as many even if all factors were equal. If you are referring to individual shootings, in the US the majority are related to gang violence, a problem that is considerably less severe in most Canadian cities. Looie496 (talk) 03:27, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

The average murder related to gang violence usually is barely mentioned in the national American news media. But once a mass shooting occurs, IMO and relatively speaking, the national media sort of acts like the "The sky is falling!" with all the coverage. Zzyzx11 (talk) 03:34, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

(ec)The U.S. has a relatively higher Gini coefficient than other countries, and the consequences of poverty are harsher. For example, access of the poor or even the middle class to serious health care generally comes at the cost of bankruptcy, and advanced procedures like transplants are notoriously kept unavailable. In those cases where welfare is still given, or in impoverished neighborhoods, conditions are such that prison ethics, complete with an intolerance for snitching and a low value on human life, hold general sway. To the poorest, prison seems so inevitable, and justice so unreliable, that it scarcely serves as a deterrent. National and international gangs and cartels are the adaptive response to the prevailing conditions, and prisons serve as their recruiting ground rather than suppressing them. Wnt (talk) 03:35, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

More poverty, a smaller social safety net, and more lax gun laws. Futurist110 (talk) 03:43, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

That's a new one. The inavailability of kidney transplants causes gun crime! If you want to see the utter absurdity of leftist thought, look no further. Instead, try the war on drugs (theft to support habits and gang turf disputes) if you want a rational explanation for the vast majority of gun violence in the US. μηδείς (talk) 04:28, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

(You've yet again failed to place your comment following the one to which you are responding, and indent from it, so I've indented appropriately, in case you fix yours.) I agree that this is a tenuous link, but there was a movie made based on it: John Q. StuRat (talk) 10:17, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

So when you "awarded" IP 203 the "pedant award" without either signing it or indenting it, while I was being threatened with Nucular Jihad for assigning people one-character large stars, that was just a mistake, StuRat? Go jump in a lake. μηδείς (talk) 23:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

And how exactly does one indent a pic ? I just added the signature. Will you be correcting your mistake ? I wasn't involved in the stars at all, so why bring that up ? And now your resorting to incivility, to boot ? StuRat (talk) 23:30, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

The entire comment above was meant as a general one, not solely in response to Wnt, so I purposefully did not indent it and do not intend to. I suppose I should have put a smiley after the suggestion you jump in a lake, I didn't think using a phrase from looney toons would be taken as actively hostile. μηδείς (talk) 18:21, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

I don't dispute the role of the War on Drugs in instigating crime, however ... aren't there anti-drug crusades in the other countries in this comparison? My feeling is that when life for the poor becomes so hazardous and squalid that prison hardly seems any worse, it loses its power to deter, even when it is used with unreasonable vindictiveness. Wnt (talk) 23:46, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Anti-drug crusades in non-American countries rarely involve killing people and seizing their assets. μηδείς (talk)

For the OP, avoiding as much of the debate as I can, you might be interested in The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. I don't have it handy, so I don't know if he directly addresses the cause of the rate of gun violence in America, but he does deal with the cultural norms that affect violence, and the impact of history. There is also an important specific example covered that might have general relevance, that is, the evidence suggesting differences in the psychological makeup of Southerners and Northerners in their response to conflict. The distinction is based on an experiment that shows (or proves, or suggests) that Southerners are more responsive to antagonism, and Pinker claims this is linked to the frontier state that persisted for longer in the South. The implication seems to be (at least as a partial explanation, surely not the whole one), that the American colonies were driven by a frontier mentality that persists today and even has lingering psychological consequences. You can draw your own conclusions from this sort of evidence, because it's not my area, but you might find the book useful. I emphasise that this does not neutralise the evidence and explanations of others, and I'm sure you can get some other (possibly better) reading suggestions here too, IBE (talk) 12:17, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I really like Pinker, and read a few hundred pages of that book. But I never did get to what his point was. μηδείς (talk) 23:23, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

The children of Marie Juliette Louvet

Marie Juliette Louvet was the grandmother of Prince Rainier of Monaco. But she was not married to the reigning Prince of Monaco. She had a husband, and bore him children. What became of her children by her husband? 69.62.243.48 (talk) 05:56, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

French Wikipedia has a little more on her husband, see fr:Achille Delmaet. It appears he was a photographer known for taking nude pictures, but otherwise I can't find much more. The French article fr:Marie-Juliette Louvet also has a little bit more on the children, such as birth and death dates, but does not go into details. --Jayron32 06:20, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Can a full blooded African American can be as light or lighter?

Can a full blooded African American can be as light or lighter? Marley84 (talk) 06:34, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Sure. Look at Michael Jackson, for instance. Futurist110 (talk) 06:38, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) What does "full blooded" mean? We're all full-blooded Africans, but we have varying degrees of time since our most recent ancestors lived there. Also, comparisons require a second thing to compare to. As light or lighter than what? If you want to research the variations within black people, the article Black people has some information to get you started. --Jayron32 06:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Im guessing he means that those who are not of mixed heritage (as in some who had the european slave owners' blood in them, or other more recent interracial marriages' offspring).

I would venture a guess to say it is possible, depending on where in Africa they came from (and by that, dont have mixed heritage with europeans or others). Ethiopians for example are considerably more lighter skinned than west/central or even southern africans. (though it sees some in the far south are lighter than the west and centre.)Lihaas (talk) 08:22, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

"Full blooded African American" is really not too meaningful -- traditionally mixed-race people have generally been considered to be black under the old One-drop rule... AnonMoos (talk) 09:54, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

"About 30% of black Americans who take DNA tests to determine their African lineage prove to be descended from Europeans on their father's side, says Rick Kittles, scientific director of African Ancestry, a Washington, D.C., company that began offering the tests in 2003. Almost all black Americans whom Kittles has tested descended from African women, he says."[1]. Alansplodge (talk) 10:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Just to get it out of the way — there is also Albinism. It is also worth noting that there are numerous population groups in Africa. I presume you mean someone from sub-Saharan Africa, and not, say, North Africa. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:26, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

You have to define the time of mixing arbitrarily. Don't forget Anthony and Cleopatra, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. And of course the countless merchant crews trading gold and opium across the Mediterranean or along the ancient Suez Canal, or the many kingdoms which have moved from place to place along the Mediterranean shores in response to the demands of trade and the tides of war. People have been making booty calls over mid-sized seas for a very very long time. Of course, even aside from those such as the Egyptians and the Afar people whom one might say are mixed, there is also substantial variation among those within Africa - compare the images from Bushmen, who I assume have little introgression of European genes, to a notably dark-skinned group of Africans such as the Dinka people. Wnt (talk) 13:36, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Worthy of note is that culturally and by decent, Cleopatra was Greek. I'm not sure that any of her ancestors were natively Egyptian. See Ptolemaic dynasty for a history of her ancestors. Certainly, they adopted Egyptian culture and the trappings of the Pharaohs, but if we're going by the somewhat arbitrary rules that you are what your ancestors were, then she isn't any more "African" than Anthony was. --Jayron32 14:31, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt

To repeat Jayron, you do realize that Cleopatra, down to her name, was Hellenistic Greek? Even Nefertiti was hardly negroid. μηδείς (talk) 23:16, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Well, since my point was that people on either side of the sea have been of mixed race for a long time, this doesn't seem like an objection. Wnt (talk) 23:48, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Well, no. Everyone is of mixed race. The North Africans like Qaddafi have been largely "white". They are at most (Mubarak) 1/4 or less "negroid". There's hardly any point in pointing out that, say, Nefertiti was "black", even if you define Oksana Baiul as pure white and Hussain Bolt as pure black.

Charles Thompson , a friend of Ernest Hemingway during his first East Africa safari ?

Hello learned humanitarians ! I saw in the german version of the article Green Hills of Africa (§ "Überblick") that Hemingway hunted with a friend named Charles Thompson. Who may he be ? (there is a lot of them in "disambiguation"...) . Thanks a lot beforehand, t.y. Arapaima (talk) 09:51, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I don't think the Charles Thompson in question has his own Wikipedia entry. Key_West#Ernest_Hemingway says he was a hardware store owner. 109.144.206.241 (talk) 10:47, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

[2] has a little more information 109.144.206.241 (talk) 10:51, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks a lot dear IP ! Arapaima (talk) 10:13, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

What went wrong with Turkey?

I just read at Nature News that even 8000 to 9500 years ago, Turkey was apparently an innovator, producing the Indo-European languages. [3] Numerous animals were apparently domesticated there (even if nailing down the details is beyond my patience at the moment). My impression is that the prominence of Ancient Greece depended substantially on people from Turkey, under their control at the time, which then passed to Roman control with the same results, even becoming the core of the empire, before finally becoming part of the Muslim world, where they continued to remain preeminent, with technology far outstripping Europe, for example. And yet, somehow, the Ottoman Empire declined, advances in civil liberties were rebuffed, there was military and scientific stagnation, and they became the "sick man of Europe". Is there any systematic explanation for the change - a climate alteration, a change from land to sea shipping, some objective phenomenon that can explain why a country goes from perpetual preeminence to obscurity? Or is it all just random fluctuation? Wnt (talk) 13:13, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I believe it has to do with the dominance of religion over science. Similarly, when Christianity dominated over science in Europe in the Middle Ages, there was stagnation there, as well. StuRat (talk) 13:28, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I can sort of see this argument, but I'm not sure how much of this is fact and how much fiction. Islam did not prevent Jabir ibn Hayyan from becoming the first alchemist, indeed, inventing much of chemistry including ironically enough the distillation of alcohol. Avicenna was free to use wine for various medicinal purposes two centuries later. True, these were Persians, living in Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates ruled from Syria and Iraq, but I'll partially ignore that as much of the political territory was shared and it's not that much of a distance. Can you say for sure that religious fanaticism became more pronounced in the past few centuries? Wnt (talk) 13:50, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

StuRat's answer is, unfortunately, one that is completely ignorant of actual history. Islam was the preeminent language of learning during the so-called Middle Ages. Religion was not the reason that Europe lacked "science" during the Middle Ages (the Church was more or less the only benefactor of higher education and learning in Europe during that time and poured huge resources into astronomical research). StuRat is speaking about bad clichés and nothing more. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:01, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Did you really want to say " Islam was the preeminent language of learning " not "Arabic was..." or "Islam was the ... vehicle of learning"? OsmanRF34 (talk) 15:12, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

If you disagree with somebody, prove them wrong, don't just call them ignorant, without proof. That just makes you look bad. And spending money on research is great, unless you constrain your researchers to keep any discoveries which run counter to your doctrine secret (like heliocentrism). StuRat (talk) 14:25, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

You don't seem to understand my argument. Neither Christianity or Islam is inherently anti-science. However, at times, both developed an anti-science attitude. These are the times when those cultures stagnated. Now, as to why those religions had such attitudes at times and not others, that's more complicated. Having a single religious leader (like the Pope) who dominated all secular leaders was a factor in Europe. After the Reformation, the power of the Pope was reduced, allowing for more freedom for those with ideas that ran counter to The Church, including scientists, especially in Northern Europe. StuRat (talk) 14:23, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

That's a good explanation for an elemenary school class maybe, but fortunately not really at all how things actually worked. See, I don't know, science in the Middle Ages for one thing. (I don't know what else to say because I know I've corrected you on this point numerous times in the past, and I'm sure many others have too, but if you don't care, then all we can ask is for you to stop repeating it...) Adam Bishop (talk) 14:50, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm going to have to back Adam Bishop on this regarding Christianity and Science in the Middle Ages. The general regression Europe experienced (in many areas, not just learning) had to do with environmental factors mostly unrelated to religion, and likely a lot more to do with demographic factors. Foremost was the de-urbanization that occured: the number and density of cities declined dramatically after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, and cities are known to be the home of innovation. This article in Scientific American magazine contains a good overview, but there's been a lot of studies, especially recently, on this topic, and there is a direct correlation between urban life and technological and cultural advancement. It would follow, then, that if people are abandoning the cities, technology and learning are going to take a hit. Furthermore, Europe in the middle ages experienced a sharp and shocking decline in population, especially those areas which had formerly been part of the Western Roman Empire, owing to widespread famine, and the Black Death. Certainly, advancements were made and Europe did advance in some areas during the time period, but that was largely in spite of the environment that people were living in, which given the historical context one would easily predict a few steps backwards. Of final note, the Catholic Church was, in many ways, the major force for what knowledge was preserved, since often the only literate people were the clergy, and they spent a lot of time copying ancient texts (not just the Bible, but also secular and pre-christian works) and many of the major scientific minds of the age were Christian clergy, including Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste and William of Ockham, all of whom had a profound influence on the development of modern science. --Jayron32 15:12, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Some points:

1) What caused people to move out of cities ?

2) Europe was in decline long before the Black Death, so it's population decline was not the driving factor.

3) Of course many of the scientists at the time were religious people, since there was very little opportunity for anyone not involved in The Church to pursue such studies, and they would risk running afoul of religious doctrine. StuRat (talk) 18:48, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Europe's population decline preceded the black death by some time. It should be noted that there were actually two population collapses, one at the end of the Roman Empire time, and one during the Late Middle Ages. The so-called High Middle Ages featured a population boom. See Medieval demography, which specifically mentions deurbanization. There are lots of possible explanations as to why the cities depopulated so much during the middle ages. Cities have advantages and disadvantages. One of the key issues is that large urban populations need armies to defend them; the pull out of the Roman legions out of many of areas coincided with the deurbanization, that is not a coincidence as cities are hard to defend and also an attractive target for raiders, being a concentration of wealth. Agricultural production also declined, perhaps due to poor soil management or climatic changes, and less food means that the cities can't support as many people. Plagues also tend to have a much greater effect on the cities: they breed plagues due to close proximity of people. The population curve would be somewhat W shaped, with a steep decline at the end of Classical antiquity and a steep rebound at the early modern period. In between, the population remained somewhat stagnant, with a bit of a hump in the curve around the 1100s and 1200s. The reason for point #3 is still deurbanization: with the abandonment of the cities, the Church became the only place which was wealthy enough and with enough training to maintain knowledge and learning. The Church didn't cause deurbanization, it had very little to do with it. --Jayron32 20:08, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I bet both deurbanization and depopulation were due to losing the Roman system of water engineering (aqueducts and such), which brought in clean water and removed sewage (although they didn't treat it). By comparison, dumping sewage in the streets was a recipe for disaster. But then the question becomes, why was this technology largely lost after the Romans ? StuRat (talk) 22:37, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Rome underwent a quick decline in population when the grain deliveries from Egypt and the province of "Africa" (i.e. current-day northern Tunisia and northeastern Algeria) were cut off... AnonMoos (talk) 04:03, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

I didn't write my response to you (StuRat), really — I wrote it for anybody out there uninformed enough not to realize that you were just being ignorant. I know better than to give you actual book references, and am highly dubious that you will bother to actually learn anything new that goes against your pre-held beliefs, but hey, go ahead and prove me wrong! Start out with Islam_and_science#History and see where you get. Maybe check out the Islamic Golden Age. There's a lot you appear to know nothing about, so it's unclear to me exactly where to start. Try looking at Catholic Church and science, focusing on the middle ages. (Of course, real historians don't even like to use the category Middle Ages, but let's set that aside for now.) There are lots of variables involved in the relationship between Islam and science, but any potential issues relating to Islam and science — which frankly are unlikely to apply to Turkey anyway, which you may or may not know is one of the most "progressive" Islamic republics in the Middle East — are extremely recent. But anyway, there are some nice references. Feel free to back up your own knee-jerk opinions with a few while you're at it. You may have areas of expertise, StuRat, but you have shown again and again on here that the study of history is not one of them. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:13, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

You apparently are too ignorant to know about the Galileo affair. Note that for every scientist who was put on trial by The Church for opposing their doctrine, many more were either warned quietly and backed off, or choose never to say or print anything publicly which The Church might find offensive. So, the cases that actually came down to a trial are but the tip of the iceberg. For example "Copernicus delayed publication of his book, perhaps from fear of criticism—a fear delicately expressed in the subsequent dedication of his masterpiece to Pope Paul III" (from Catholic Church and science). Then we have Catholic_Church_and_science#Gessner. Also see List of authors and works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. In the Muslim world, we have the destruction of the Istanbul observatory of Taqi al-Din. Most relevant to the OP is why the Islamic Golden Age came to an end: "...in addition to invasion by the Mongols and crusaders and the destruction of libraries and madrasahs, it has also been suggested that political mismanagement and the stifling of ijtihad (independent reasoning) in the 12th century in favor of institutionalised taqleed (imitation) thinking played a part." In the case of The Crusades, here we have a case of Christianity stifling Muslim science. StuRat (talk) 18:57, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

That ignores the fact that Galileo did not live in the Middle Ages, he lived during the Protestant Reformation, and the political milleu surounding him was very different than the middle ages. This does not excuse what the Church did to him, which was without question inexcusable, however inexcusable is not a synonym for unexplainable, and understanding what happened to Galileo necessitates understaning the political landscape of early 17th century Europe, which was some half a millenium after the time period we're talking about. Connecting the dots between the loss of learning in the middle ages and what the church did to Galileo belies a complete misreading of history and a huge conflation of unrelated issues. The 1600s were NOT the 1100s. It should also be noted that the Church's efforts against Galileo were largely impotent; learning and technological advances when unabated despite their efforts, while in the middle ages, when Church clergy was at the vanguard of scientific advances some 400 years earlier, and showed no doctrinal objections to sceintific study AT ALL, Europe was moving backwards. There just isn't any evidence that there was any causal relationship between church doctrine that was hostile to science (which again, occured in the early 1600s during the Protestant Reformation and must be understood in that context) and the much earlier decline of European civilization and learning that occured after the fall of the Western Empire. It is wrong to make that connection chronologically, and it doesn't bear out with the actual facts of the history. --Jayron32 20:19, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

There's also the tendency of The Church to keep scholarly works in Latin, Greek, or other classic languages, making them inaccessible to the vast majority. But perhaps it's what they didn't do when they were dominant that's more to the point. For example, there was no universal education until secular authorities became preeminent. So, their policies assured a small educated elite and ignorant masses, which doesn't lead to rapid development. StuRat (talk) 22:30, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I think it's a fair enough criticism that the Church may have had the means to spread learning farther than it did; however I think you overestimate its role. Considering the demographic, economic, and environmental events in Europe between 500-1500, any efforts a small smattering of monks may have had could have amounted to pissing in the ocean. You can be correct that the Church centers of learning remained inwards looking and did not disseminate what they knew to the general population, but I don't think that made much of a difference one way or the other. --Jayron32 22:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Why wouldn't it ? The Renaissance was somewhat kicked off by a rediscovery of the works of the ancient Greeks, etc. If that knowledge had been widespread earlier, perhaps we would have gotten an earlier Renaissance. As I noted previously, Roman water engineering principles would have been quite valuable. StuRat (talk) 22:47, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

The social, economic, and environmental conditions present when the Renaissance happened enabled people the leisure time, especially in the Urban centers of Italy initially, and then in other urban centers, to study the ancient classic texts. You're still putting the cart before the horse. --Jayron32 23:04, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

But many of those social, economic, and environmental conditions were a result of a lack of ancient knowledge. Knowledge and social, economic, and environmental conditions are interdependent, not simply cause and effect. StuRat (talk) 23:26, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Except the renaissance didn't result in clean water coming to the cities again. It wasn't by reading Aristotle and Livy and Cicero that people stopped shitting where they drank. It wasn't until people like Joseph Aspdin developed portland cement that building materials aproached the type of concrete that the Romans used to build the aqueducts, and engineers like Joseph Bazalgette started building sewerage containment and transport facilities, and that came in the 1800s. Those men worked in the UK, but similar developments occured in other major cities at around the same time. Water supply and sanitation in the United States confirms that even in the U.S. people didn't figure out it would be a good idea to seperate human fecal waste from water supplies until the 1880s or so. Again, if you're going to hang your hat on clean water supplies as being the key allowing urbanization, it neither was a result of studying classical learning, nor did it come about prior to the regrowth of cities. Look Stu, myself and several others have presented actual facts from the historical record to back up our position. You've asserted a lot of things, but haven't presented a single bit of evidence that your notions are correct. You can't just assert stuff as reality without any evidence, and especially when evidentiary-based counterarguments are presented. --Jayron32 00:30, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

But how was the Roman knowledge of building cement lost ? Was it in one or more of the many libraries destroyed by religious conflict ? If so, we might have had decent sanitation far earlier. And yes, once it became the norm to have a total lack of sanitation, then you not only had the lack of technology to overcome, but also tradition. StuRat (talk) 00:38, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Practical knowledge like mixing concrete isn't something that's preserved in libraries. How many contractors do you know today that go to a library to figure out how to mix concrete? The knowledge wasn't lost because libraries were destroyed or people stopped reading the books therein. Lots of knowledge gets lost because it is procedural knowledge that is passed from person-to-person, and when the people who know how to do something stop teaching it to others, the knowledge gets lost. Without people living in cities, there wasn't a need for concrete mixers and building on that scale. People living in mud huts don't have much use for such knowledge. Concrete is an almost purely urban technology: no cities, no need for concrete. The decline in urbanization caused the knowledge of how to build good cities to decline as well: without the legions to defend the cities, people left them. Without people in the cities, there was no need for the sort of monumental building, including aqueducts and sewers, that cities needed. When people returned to the cities some thousand years later, they had to relearn all of that stuff from first principles because no one had been doing it for a thousand years, not because someone burnt a book. --Jayron32 04:43, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

I certainly would expect to find a recipe for concrete in a library. And cities didn't disappear entirely. StuRat (talk) 12:12, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Well, actually it was described in De Architectura by Vitruvius. Anyway...what does any of this have to do with anything? There isn't even a coherent argument happening here, much less anything that has to do with the original question. Adam Bishop (talk) 12:45, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Galileo got in trouble mostly because he was a dick about it (insulting the Pope, etc). Also, the crusades had absolutely nothing to do with stifling Muslim science. I'm not even sure how that would have worked. Do you have an example of this? If anything the crusades facilitated introducing Muslim science into Europe, from another direction (since it was already happening in Spain and Sicily). The Mongol destruction of Baghdad was far more destructive than anything the crusades ever did (well, akin to the crusader sack of Constantinople, anyway...but that had no effect on Muslim science either, heh). Adam Bishop (talk) 19:42, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

As stated above, by the destruction of libraries, institutions of learning, etc. And, more subtly, during a religious war resources will go to armaments and religious indoctrination, not science (with an exception for sciences having immediate military applications). StuRat (talk) 19:47, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Improbable. Religious indoctrination is not compatible with science.--Askedonty (talk) 19:54, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Says you. --Jayron32 22:58, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Sincerily I have not a final answer about that. Major religions seem all to have begun more or less in revolutionary ways, obviously restricting freedom of though or at least, of expression. But my remark concerned only indoctrination. --Askedonty (talk) 09:07, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Nonsense. These were Hellenic and Byzantine libraries written in Greek, not Turkish, and not Arabic, and institutions that had been co-opted by the Turks, who happened to chose Islam as more suited to their military lifestyle than Christianity. Is there evidence that any of these institutions were targeted for destruction by the crusaders, rather than collateral damage? μηδείς (talk) 19:57, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Doesn't matter who built them or why they were destroyed, the fact remains that they were. StuRat (talk) 20:01, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Or...destroyed at all, even. The Jewish library in Jerusalem (or was it Ascalon?) suffered from the initial crusader invasion, but I don't think they did much damage to Muslim institutions anywhere.Adam Bishop (talk) 20:00, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

The Crusaders were a minor footnote in the history of Islam; the Levant was never the center of Islamic culture during the 1000-1300 period when the Crusades were active, and they never held much territory or any significant population centers aside from Jerusalem. Islam's major cities (Alexandria, Damascus, especially Baghdad) remained out of Crusader hands. It would be like the Russians invading and capturing coastal Oregon and Washington and perhaps Seattle, and then claiming they had somehow had a hand in destroying or hastening the destruction of the U.S. The Crusaders were an annoyance at worst. The real damage to Islamic culture and learning came from the East and not the West; the Siege of Baghdad (1258) by the Mongols (already mentioned) was far more significant. That would be like the Russians nuking New York. --Jayron32 22:58, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

The Crusaders also destroyed at least one "Christian" library, the Imperial Library of Constantinople, during the Fourth Crusade. Under Destruction_of_libraries#Human_action you will find many examples of libraries destroyed for religious reasons. StuRat (talk) 23:17, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

It's not "random fluctuation" but it's not necessarily some external factor that causes it. Take a look at the Ottoman Empire page. There's a lot going on in the world between 1299 and 1922. The Ottomans fell behind in several key areas: exploration, resource exploitation, industrialization, war-making, and empire consolidation (which is hard no matter how prosperous you are, especially at a time when ethnic nationalism was on the rise). I don't think there's any one, single, external factor that accounts for it, unless you want to count "the rise of Europe" as an external factor. (What accounts for the rise of Europe? A lot of things. Unimpeded access to the resources of the New World didn't hurt, though.) --Mr.98 (talk) 14:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

(ec) One thing to realize is that the Turkic peoples originally lived in Central Asia, and only migrated to Turkey around the 11th century AD. They have nothing to do with the ancient Anatolians, who lived there originally. Furthermore, the emergence of a language is not a sign of civilization. Some very 'primitive' tribes have amazingly complex languages. We don't have any preserved writing from these early periods (before c. 3000 BC); the Nature article is based on computer models, not archaeology. That's not to say that the ancient Anatolians were not a 'great people', they're just completely unrelated to modern Turkey. Regarding the Ottoman Empire, see Mr.98's comments above. - Lindert (talk) 14:18, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)x4 Um, there's a big problem with the OPs question and some of the answers given. The patch of dirt currently occupied by the Turkish people was not occupied by the Turkish people 8000 years ago, or even 2000 years ago. Or even their ancestors. The ancestors of the modern Turkish people are not Indo-European people, so the fact that the people who spoke the Proto-Indo-European language may have come from there has no connection to the modern nation of Turkey. Turks come from a very different part of Asia, and migrated into the current place we call Turkey during the middle ages, long after PIE, see Turkish_people#Origins. So, if we are trying to figure out what is different between the Turkish people today and the people who lived in what we now call Turkey some 8000 years ago, it helps to note that those people aren't the ancestors of modern Turks. Secondly, the predominant explantion for the origin of PIE is that it originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, basically what is now the extreme southeastern corner of Europe where it meets the (somewhat arbitrary boundary) with Asia. The origins of the language in what is now Turkey is but one explanation, and does not appear to be the one held by the majority of scholars, and even if it were true, the people who live there now are not the decendants of those who lived there 8000 years ago. The article History of Anatolia has some good information on the various peoples who have called that place home. Thirdly, speaking a language that later evolves into other languages isn't really an innovation: that would imply that there was something about PIE that made it better than other languages at the time and that innovation lead to it being spread or something like that. What causes a language to spread has a lot more to do with politics and factors unrelated to the quality of the language itself. --Jayron32 14:23, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Jayron32 -- there was not anything approaching a complete population replacement in Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert (1071). A number of the pre-1071 inhabitants of Anatolia were heretics or quasi-Manicheans who were not too attached to Orthodox Christianity as officially defined at Constantinople in the first place. Also, the classic Islamic missionary "Sufi bait-and-switch" was employed -- the first wave of Islamic missionaries that most ordinary people in villages would have encountered would have been itinerant Sufis, who would have promulgated a form of Islam as a joyful religion which imposed very light demands; all the Shariah legalism etc. didn't come along until a later phase... As for the Pontic-Caspian steppe, see the Kurgan Hypothesis comments below... AnonMoos (talk) 16:56, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

There almost never is a "complete population replacement", and it didn't happen over night, but over time the dominant culture and the dominated population can start to assymilate. The important bit isn't how fast, or in what manner, Anatolia when from the Hellenistic sphere to the Turkish sphere, the point is that it did unquestionably did happen, and culturally and linguistically there is still more connection between the ancient Turkic peoples who lived elsewhere at the time cited (9000 BC) than with the people who lived in Anatolia at that time. The point is the land we call Turkey hasn't always (or even long, comparitively speaking) been Turkish, but rather had been of a distinct and unrelated culture until the middle ages. --Jayron32 19:54, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

There certainly has been a dramatic cultural transformation, but you said "the people who live there now are not the decendants of those who lived there 8000 years ago" -- and even if there had been a complete population replacement after 1071, this would still be unlikely according to Most recent common ancestor mathematics, and given what actually did happen after 1071, it's not factual... By the way, from ca. 600 AD to 1071 AD, Anatolia was kind of the center of gravity of the Greek-speaking world (more so than Greece proper, which was partly overrun with Slavic-speakers). AnonMoos (talk) 04:00, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

I should clarify then. The people that live there certainly have genetic ancestors that lived in Anatolia. Culturally, however, there is little trace (except a few Turkified names of older Greek origin)) of the former culture of the area. Your point about it being a Greek land from 600-1000 is very relevent to my point. It wasn't Turkish in culture in any way. Indeed, parts of Anatolia remained Greek even after the Seljuks moved in; Trebizond and Nicea were Greek for several centuries after Manzikert. However, by the time that the Ottomans became the "Old man of Europe", Anatolia had (excepting perhaps some pockets along the Ionian coast) become mostly Turkish. The point is that if one is trying to figure out what happened to the Turkish culture in Anatolia that was different than some distant point in the past, Turkish culture didn't arrive in Anatolia until the middle ages. --Jayron32 04:36, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Well the Ottoman Empire isn't Turkey. This question makes it sound like you're asking what went wrong with Turkey today, rather than the Ottoman Empire. As for the latter, a number of reasons. Firstly, size. It was too large to be able to administer for centuries. Eventually, you got lazy kings and ineffective bureaucracies. This led to outside parts of the empire becoming their own independent territory, such as in the Balkans, or falling to another empire, such as the Safavids. Shifts in government also destablizied the kingdom, as well as new war technology in the hands of other countries. Hope it helps. --Activism1234 14:23, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

No, the Ottoman Empire was Turkey. Contemporary documents frequently called it "Turkey", both internally and externally, and the modern nation of Turkey is a direct successor state to what was the Ottoman Empire. Certainly, it controlled lots of non-Turkish lands, because that is what Empires do, but as the hegemony within the Empire was Turkey, it is common and correct to think of it as the Turkish Empire. In the same way that the Austian Empire is a predecessor state to the modern country of Austia, or that the Holy Roman Empire is a predecessor state to Germany, or that the Soviet Union is a predecessor state to modern Russia, it is fine to think of the Ottoman Empire as a predecessor state to modern Turkey. The Sultans were Turks, the language of government was Turkish. It was Turkey with a bunch of dominated territories tacked on as the "empire" part. Yes, they are not identical, any more than Russia is identical to the Soviet Union, but neither are they entirely unrelated states, as though the modern nation of Turkey winked into existance in 1923 with no connection to the former Ottoman Turkish Empire. --Jayron32 14:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps, but the question posed by the OP would've been clearer to just say the Ottoman Empire which denotes a different time period and territories than Turkey does. --Activism1234 19:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Not exactly. The Turkish (as opposed to Iranian or Arabic or Maghrebi or Bulgarian or Greek) part of the Ottoman Empire, covers roughly the same extent as the modern state of Turkey, and that region and that culture dominated the Ottoman politics. There was not an equal partnership between ethnicities within the Ottoman empire. --Jayron32 19:54, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

What went wrong with Turkey? arbitrary break #1

Wnt -- regarding one of the premises of your question, it's been noticeable for a while now that very few actual linguists support the Anatolian hypothesis, and I really don't see that dramatically changing anytime soon, despite the latest study reported in the news (a study which was not conducted by linguists, you'll note). Linguists are much more likely to be convinced by the Kurgan hypothesis (or slight modifications and elaborations of the Kurgan hypothesis). As for Turkish backwardness, such backwardness did not begin to be conspicuously visible to either Europeans or to the Ottomans themselves until after the events of 1683 (the failed Siege of Vienna) -- before 1683, the Ottomans won more than they lost. Some historians would say that the Ottomans didn't decline much at all in absolute terms, but they failed to keep pace with European developments, and so declined in relative terms. Many people in Muslim lands were somewhat contemptuous of "infidels", and didn't think there was much to be learned from non-Muslims. One warning sign was that while Europe was enthusiastically adopting the invention of printing with movable metal type, before the 18th century such printing was allowed in the Ottoman empire only if it was in a script other than Arabic, and intended for a non-Muslim readership... AnonMoos (talk) 16:44, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Wow - I never expected to get so many intriguingly detailed answers. Of them, the strangest is the notion that the modern-day Turkish people are of a different race (and culture?) than those living there pre-1100. There's a lot of history in these articles, so could someone do me a favor and explain how on Earth that happened? But the universal censorship described in this last one best fits my ideological preconceptions of what it would take to destroy a nation so thoroughly - can you elaborate? Wnt (talk) 18:36, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I have to chime in with Jayron and AnonMoos on the very weak support for the Anatolian Hypothesis among linguists. The latest study is based on a statistical analysis with suspect premises. And it has no actual tie to archeological evidence. The 9000 year date, were it true, could have occurred anywhere. There is nothing actually tying it to Anatolia. The Kurgan hypothesis matches detailed linguistic data with strong archeaological evidence. See J P Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans. μηδείς (talk) 19:22, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Wnt, it is fascinating, isn't it? Basically before 1100, the territory of modern Turkey was known as Anatolia, and had been part of the Byzantine Empire, and earlier the Roman Empire, for well over a thousand years. For a few centuries before that it was largely Greek (to simplify things a bit). Some famous ancient Greeks were from there - Herodotus, and a lot of the Greek scientists/philosophers for example. Anyway, between 1000 and 1100, Turkic nomads from further east in central Asia had started moving west, pushed out of where they were previously living by other Turkic groups (including, ultimately, the Mongols). They settled in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. These were the Seljuk Turks. The Byzantines weren't altogether happy with that, but the Seljuks defeated them in a battle in 1071 and conquered most of Anatolia. They didn't completely replace the Greek population, but they ruled the territory, and their successors a few centuries later were the Ottomans. Adam Bishop (talk) 19:36, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Hellenic is a much better adjective than Greek. The indigenous populations spoke Anatolian languages and Afroasiatic languages and Caucasian languages as well as the Armenian language and others before the influx of Ottoman Turkish. μηδείς (talk) 19:47, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

See Hurrian language, Hattian language, and Ugaritic language. 05:08, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

To be fair, all of those languages had gone extinct some centuries (or in some cases millenia) before the Turks moved into Anatolia. --Jayron32 05:11, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, perhaps, and I suspect so as well. But your claim is based on negative evidence. The OP would do well to read the articles I have linked to. Various Indo-European Anatolian languages the family of which I have already linked to, and Hellenistic Greek, were probably current when the Altaic Turks invaded. μηδείς (talk) 05:18, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Which ones, other than Greek, were spoken in Anatolia during the centuries leading up to, and covering the time period, when the Turks moved in? Other than Armenian and the Caucasian languages along the eastern edges of what might be called Anatolia, all of the languages you cite above don't seem to be attested in Anatolia at that time: the Anatolian languages article you cite notes that they had all gone extinct quite a long time before the Turks arived, to be replaced almost completely by Greek, I also don't see any specific Afroasiatic languages listed that were extent in Anatolia during, say 100-1000 AD, excepting maybe Hewbrew used by any Jewish populations; though I suspect that most, if not all, Jewish people living in Anatolia at that time were fully Hellenized. --Jayron32 05:30, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

We agree there is no evidence that those languages or their descendents were actively being spoken at the time of the Ottoman invasions. μηδείς (talk) 18:10, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

It's not unheard of that groups of people move from one place to another. I would compare it to Australia or North America: 500 years ago there were 'no' whites there, and now they are the majority population, having supplanted the original population. V85 (talk) 15:26, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

I recognize these examples - but I'd always regarded them as a rare aberration, the result of populations coming into contact after thousands of years of separation, so that disease resistance, agriculture, metallurgy, and military technology all conspired to harm native populations of Australia and North America. For a country to be completely overrun and replaced by a neighbor it has been in contact with - well, it happens, for example in South Africa, or in the steppes of Asia, but I thought this was typical of nomadic civilizations where moving was relatively easy. For a place like Anatolia to be replaced - that's something different. Wnt (talk) 15:14, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

There's a business in New York that's closed on weekends.

In front is a stoop, well, a couple of steps, with the chalked message "No sitting." Can I sit there? 66.108.223.179 (talk) 15:10, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I don't care. Wait until the business is open, then ask the owners what they think. --Jayron32 15:15, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

This sounds like a request for legal advice, which we can't provide. For general background you might see loitering or perhaps trespassing. Wnt (talk) 18:44, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Can you? Probably. May you? Probably not. Should you? No. 2001:18E8:2:1020:C2:8653:9179:E109 (talk) 18:46, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I second Jayron's advice: Ask the owners what it's about. It's possible they've had trouble with loiterers, and if you stick around too long, you might get towed. You wouldn't want that. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:03, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Is it normal for people sitting to get towed throughout the US or only in New York? Here in NZ they only do it with motorised vehicles. If it's a person sitting on the ground or steps you may be asked to move on, served with a trespass notice, or worst case scenario arrested, but never towed.... Nil Einne (talk) 18:28, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

It depends on how big the person who needs to be moved is. I've seen some people that need a tow truck to move around. --Jayron32 18:31, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Ask not whom New Yorkers tow. They'll tow thee. Clarityfiend (talk) 06:46, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

where could I email

where could I email the administrators of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org please? Thanks. --80.99.254.208 (talk) 17:51, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Probably at admin {at} mozilla.org. OsmanRF34 (talk) 19:01, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

What academic field studies volunteerism?

Are there any academic fields that study volunteerism? I know political science has a lot of insights on civic engagement and sociology has some on social groups, but does any field scientifically investigate things like outcomes of volunteers, reasons people volunteer, etc in a social scientific manner like causation studies? I'm sorry I cannot be more specific here.--108.23.47.101 (talk) 18:20, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

You are right on track. Each social science is probably studying it from a different perspective: economical, sociological, psychological, and so on. OsmanRF34 (talk) 19:03, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm... maybe are there any interdisciplinary groupings out there then?--108.23.47.101 (talk) 19:07, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Almost certainly behavioral economics would be an important part of the stew of disciplines studying volunteerism. Certain of the more practical fields of philosophy, such as pragmatism, may also apply. --Jayron32 22:36, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Also in your Business and Economics Faculty: Political science (Kropotkin & Mutual Aid), Labour history (solidarity), Industrial Relations, Organisational Studies, Human Resources management. Fifelfoo (talk) 22:49, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Sociology in its Form as 3rd Sector Studies. Any sector of sociology active in the realm of civil society-theory / contemporary cultural theory as well as philosophical schools around that topic (e.g. Jürgen Habermas via Gramsci for the Neo-Marxists.), political science insofar it considers civic engagement as pertinent to the object of discussion. Network theory insofar as volunteer groups may be the source of weak ties. Economics were already mentioned. Literature of interest might be: Jeffrey Alexander The Civil Sphere (Oxford University Press, 2006) Psychology I do not know wherefore I cannot attest to the involvement in volunteer studies. --Abracus (talk) 12:25, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Generally I guess social psychology, specifically the study of altruism. I've taught volunteer management and theories of volunteering, and my teaching made use of the work of Paolo Freire, Robert Putnam, Will Hutton, Anthony Giddens among others: game theory played a part too. --TammyMoet (talk) 13:55, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

OP here on a different IP. Thanks everyone. Definitely gave me some things to look into. Your help is appreciated.159.83.4.160 (talk) 22:44, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

0-bedroom housing units

I just ran across a U.S. government document from the 1970s in which HUD defined fair rents for each county in the country for different types of housing units. Each county had an entry for housing units of 0 bedrooms, 1 bedroom, 2 bedrooms, 3 bedrooms, and 4 bedrooms, with separate lines for with-elevator and without-elevator. What kind of housing unit would be defined as having 0 bedrooms? Is this just some bureaucratic designation for what everyone else would call a 1-bedroom unit? Or did HUD care about places that really weren't housing at all? 2001:18E8:2:1020:C2:8653:9179:E109 (talk) 18:45, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Part of the reason I'm confused is the idea of a 0-bedroom unit with an elevator, which would make more sense when we're talking about things that really aren't housing at all. 2001:18E8:2:1020:C2:8653:9179:E109 (talk) 18:48, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

studio apartment perhaps?--108.23.47.101 (talk) 19:08, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, a studio apartment has no bedroom. You find them in major city centers. A one-bedroom in Manhattan means a closet you can sleep in with a combined living room/kitchen. A studio has a combined living room/kitchen/sleep space. μηδείς (talk) 19:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

In the UK, at least, it is very common for a studio apartment to be listed as "0 bedrooms", so I agree that is almost certainly what they mean. --Tango (talk) 20:35, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it seems to be a matter of definition. If a bedroom is "any room which is designed to contain a bed, among other uses", then a studio has 1, while if it's "any room which is designed primarily to contain a bed", then a studio has 0. StuRat (talk) 22:24, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Note the trendy practice of using old businesses as homes. Such a home may have an elevator to take you to your floor, which is a huge open space, with no separate bedroom. StuRat (talk) 19:42, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

That's called a loft apartment in NYC. μηδείς (talk) 23:10, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

0 bedroom apartments are what we would call a "bachelor's suite" in Canada. The number usually refers to the number of separate bedrooms, something a government studying adequate housing for families might be interested in. --NellieBly (talk) 02:13, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

That's rather effing sexist. Thank God I've never rented north of the Bronx. μηδείς (talk) 05:05, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

I don't know how it works in other parts of the world, but the American (and UK?) system of counting the bedrooms always confuses me. In Sweden, and I assume at least some other places, you count the number of rooms. So, a studio is a one room apartment, and what you'd call a 3 bedroom apartment, we'd call a "4-roomer". /Coffeeshivers (talk) 22:16, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

We would also call a three bedroom apartment a 4-room apartment, uness it had a full living room and a full kitchen, in which case it would be a five-room apartment. What confuses you? μηδείς (talk) 03:45, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Canadian Equalization Formula

Doe anyone know the exactly how fiscal capacity is calculated for the purposes of federal equalization payments in Canada? I know (50% of) actual revenues from natural resources are used. For the rest of the categories (personal income taxes, business income taxes, consumption taxes, and property taxes and miscellaneous), "fiscal capacity" is used. Fiscal capacity is defined to be the per capita revenue yield that a particular province would obtain using average tax rates. Does anyone know how this calculation is actually done? Finding the tax rate is relatively straight forward, but how is the tax base calculated? Eiad77 (talk) 21:29, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Page 40 of this document has some information, although it doesn't go into full details. This is the sort of arcane stuff which only a handful of economists at the Ministry of Finance fully understand. You may need to contact them directly to get more precise references. --Xuxl (talk) 09:51, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. That's what I was afraid of. Incidentally, that document is from before the most recent changes to the equalization formula in 2008, so it is slightly out of date. Eiad77 (talk) 11:10, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

US presidential debates

When was the last time a third candidate was included in a US presidential debate? Bzweebl (talk • contribs) 22:14, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Ross Perot in the United States presidential election, 1992. StuRat (talk) 22:19, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! That was my first guess. Bzweebl (talk • contribs) 22:24, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

You're welcome. Also see United States presidential election debates. I'll mark this Q resolved. StuRat (talk) 22:25, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Resolved