Congratulations to Sean M. Clark, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of interdisciplinary social sciences for his paper Revealing Clio’s Secrets: The Case for Historical Macromeasurement
Abstract: An excessive focus on methodological training and recent case studies has left political scientists woefully ignorant of work done by scholars in other fields, particularly that of economic historians and historical demographers. Most glaringly, political science has missed the emergence of ‘cliodynamics,’ or the novel attempt to fashion broad historical trends into consistently measurable data over great lengths of time. I therefore not only submit a comprehensive survey of the population, economy, and conflict research offered by historiographers, but also explain how this data can be harnessed by political science.
If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.
From Austin Dacey, Skeptical Inquirer
Just as soon as anyone notes the dismal state of science in contemporary Muslim-majority countries, someone else with a little knowledge of 
history will observe that the Islamic world was once the center of the scientific world, and Arabic was once the lingua franca. From the eighth to the end of the fourteenth centuries, the most important work in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, optics, and medicine took place under Muslim rule.
Before Europe’s first university had opened in Bologna, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad was amassing a library that reportedly housed as many as four hundred thousand volumes. There, under the patronage of the Abbasid dynasty, Arabic-speaking scholars—including Persians, Christians, Jews, and others—translated Greek texts by authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen, as well as material in Persian, Syriac, and Sanskrit. It was not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that this ancient learning came to Europe, primarily by way of Muslim Spain. As late as the seventeenth century, European colleges still relied on the Canon, a medical textbook by Avicenna, the Latinized name of the medieval physician and polymath Ibn Sina.
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Congratulations to all of the Award Winner finalists:
Maria Chong Abdullah, Habibah Elias, Rahil Mahyuddin and Jegak Uli: The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Adjustment Amongst First Year Students in a Malaysian Public University
Helen Joanna Boon, Stephen Tobias, Bernhard T. Baune, Tarun Sen Gupta and Lee Kennedy: Ars Cooperativa Naturae. Ethical Contingencies Across Medicine and Education: A Case Study
Chris Braddock: Sympathetic Magic and Contemproary Art: Stanley J. Tambiah’s Persuasive Analogy in Ritual Performance (to be included in an upcoming issue)
D. Burcu Egilmez: The Politics of the Turkish Gecekondu (Slum) Dwellers: A Case Study on the Izmir Kurucesme District
Joseph Galbo: Ethnographies of Empire and Resistance: “Wilderness” and the “Vanishing Indian” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” and John Tanner’s “Narrative of Captivity”
Barbara J. Kampa and Raphael Nawrotzki: Assisting and Protecting Refugee Women: A Policy Analysis
Fazil Najafi, Sofia Vidalis, Kim Munksgaard and Matthew Diamond: Effective Environmental Policy toward Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions Produced from Transportation (to be included in an upcoming issue)
Amla Salleh, Zahara Aziz, Abd. Aziz Mahyuddin and Zuria Mahmud: How do Malaysian Adolescent Children Perceive their Fathers’ Involvement in their Parenting?
Krista Sigler: Great Expectations: Advertising and the Problem of Consumer Capitalism in Late Imerial Russia, 1905-1917
From Russell Blackford, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Evolution and Technology:
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Children’s Participation? Learning from Children and Adults in the Asia-Pacific Region edited by Jan Mason, Natalie Bolzan and Anil Kumar is available from The Social Sciences imprint.
This edited book is the result of collaboration between five countries in the Asia Pacific Region. It is auspiced by Childwatch International, a global research network.
It explores the socio-cultural context of children’s participation in the five countries, in response to the obligations on these countries, as signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. While the legal mandating of participation has significant implications for children’s lives and adult-child relations, research in this area has been limited, particularly cross culturally.
