Max Weber and the First World War: Protestant and Catholic living standards in Germany, 1914-1919

We assess informal institutions of Protestants and Catholics by investigating their economic resilience in a natural experiment. The First World War constitutes an exogenous shock to living standards since the duration and intensity of the war exceeded all expectations. We assess the ability of Protestant and Catholic communities to cope with increasing food prices and wartime black markets. Literature based on Weber (1904, 1905) suggests that Protestants must be more resilient than their Catholic peers. Using individual height data on some 2,800 Germans to assess levels of malnutrition during the war, we find that living standards for both Protestants and Catholics declined; however, the decrease of Catholics’ height was disproportionately large. Our empirical analysis finds a large statistically significant difference between Protestants and Catholics for the 1915–19 birth cohort, and we argue that this height gap cannot be attributed to socioeconomic background and fertility alone.

Max Weber and the First World War: Protestant and Catholic living standards in Germany, 1915-1919

We assess informal institutions of Protestants and Catholics by investigating their economic
resilience in a natural experiment. The First World War constitutes an exogenous shock to living standards since the duration and intensity of the war exceeded all expectations. We assess the ability of Protestant and Catholic communities to cope with increasing food prices and wartime black markets. Literature based on Weber (1904, 1905) suggests that Protestants must be more resilient than their Catholic peers. Using individual height data on some 2,800 Germans to assess levels of malnutrition during the war, we find that living standards for both Protestants and Catholics declined; however, the decrease of Catholics’ height was disproportionately large. Our empirical analysis finds a large statistically significant difference between Protestants and Catholics for the 1914-19 birth cohort, and we argue that this height gap cannot be attributed to socioeconomic background and fertility alone.

Violence against women in the Irish War of Independence, 1919-1921

This chapter examines the nature and extent of violence experienced by women in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) at the hands of both the Crown forces and the Irish Republican Army. It argues that targetted killings of women by either side was rare. The most common forms of such violence can be categorised as physical, gendered (cutting of hair) and psychological (intimidation and the killing of male relatives). It argues that there was a difference between gendered and sexual crime, the latter of which appears to have been very uncommon. A considerable part of the chapter uses theoretical literature on violence against women in conflict zones to explain why sexual violence was uncommon, arguing that neither side had much to gain from its employment, that the Crown forces were aware of the damage it could do to Britain's international reputation and that the terror tactics adopted by the Crown forces were sufficient to achieve their ends without resorting to rape. In regard to the IRA, the absence of any evidence of rape or sexual assault being perpetrated could be attributable to their Catholicism, reliance on support from the community, the efforts of the first Dáil to achieve foreign recognition of the Republic and the role of Cumann na mBan women in the guerrilla conflict. The historiography of women in the Irish revolution is also analysed.

Exact and heuristic methods for solving Boolean games

Boolean games are a framework for reasoning about the rational behavior of agents whose goals are formalized using propositional formulas. Compared to normal form games, a well-studied and related game framework, Boolean games allow for an intuitive and more compact representation of the agents’ goals. So far, Boolean games have been mainly studied in the literature from the Knowledge Representation perspective, and less attention has been paid on the algorithmic issues underlying the computation of solution concepts. Although some suggestions for solving specific classes of Boolean games have been made in the literature, there is currently no work available on the practical performance. In this paper, we propose the first technique to solve general Boolean games that does not require an exponential translation to normal-form games. Our method is based on disjunctive answer set programming and computes solutions (equilibria) of arbitrary Boolean games. It can be applied to a wide variety of solution concepts, and can naturally deal with extensions of Boolean games such as constraints and costs. We present detailed experimental results in which we compare the proposed method against a number of existing methods for solving specific classes of Boolean games, as well as adaptations of methods that were initially designed for normal-form games. We found that the heuristic methods that do not require all payoff matrix entries performed well for smaller Boolean games, while our ASP based technique is faster when the problem instances have a higher number of agents or action variables.

Using Answer Set Programming for Solving Boolean Games

Boolean games are a framework for reasoning about the rational behaviour of agents, whose goals are formalized using propositional formulas. They offer an attractive alternative to normal-form games, because they allow for a more intuitive and more compact encoding. Unfortunately, however, there is currently no general, tailor-made method available to compute the equilibria of Boolean games. In this paper, we introduce a method for finding the pure Nash equilibria based on disjunctive answer set programming. Our method is furthermore capable of finding the core elements and the Pareto optimal equilibria, and can easily be modified to support other forms of optimality, thanks to the declarative nature of disjunctive answer set programming. Experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Decentralized Computation of Pareto Optimal Pure Nash Equilibria of Boolean Games with Privacy Concerns

In Boolean games, agents try to reach a goal formulated as a Boolean formula. These games are attractive because of their compact representations. However, few methods are available to compute the solutions and they are either limited or do not take privacy or communication concerns into account. In this paper we propose the use of an algorithm related to reinforcement learning to address this problem. Our method is decentralized in the sense that agents try to achieve their goals without knowledge of the other agents’ goals. We prove that this is a sound method to compute a Pareto optimal pure Nash equilibrium for an interesting class of Boolean games. Experimental results are used to investigate the performance of the algorithm.

Think, code, succeed: The Programming Studio as a games-based collaboration:Paper published in the Proceedings of the Association for Teacher Education in Europe conference: Teacher Education through Partnerships and Collaborative Learning Communities, Glasgow, UK. ATEE, 2015

This paper investigates the profile of teachers in the island of Ireland who declared themselves willing to undertake professional development activities in programming, in particular to master programming by taking on-line courses involving the design of computer games. Using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), it compares scores for teachers “willing” to undertake the courses with scores for those who declined, and examines other differences between the groups of respondents. Findings reflect the perceived difficulties of programming and the current low status accorded to the subject in Ireland. The paper also reviews the use of games-based learning as a “hook” to engage learners in programming and discusses the role of gamification as a tool for motivating learners in an on-line course. The on-line course focusing on games design was met with enthusiasm, and there was general consensus that gamification was appropriate for motivating learners in structured courses such as those provided.

Review of Mark F. Chingono. The State, Violence and Development. The Political Economy of War in Mozambique, 1975–1992.

Book review of: Mark F. Chingono. The State, Violence and Development. The Political Economy of War in Mozambique, 1975–1992. Avebury (Aldershot, Brookfield USA, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney), 1996. 291 pp. Foreword by Keith Hart. Tables. Appendix. Selected Bibliography. Index. £42.00. $71.95. Cloth.

Holidays in the Danger Zone: Entanglements of War and Tourism

A timely, and uniquely historical, look at how war turns soldiers, and all of us, into tourists. Holidays in the Danger Zone exposes the mundane and everyday entanglements between two seemingly opposed worlds—warfare and tourism. Debbie Lisle shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behavior of soldiers in warespecially the experiences of Western military forces in “exotic” settings. This includes not only R&R but also how battlefields themselves become landscapes of leisure and tourism. It further explores how a military sensibility shapes the development of tourism in the postwar context, from “Dark Tourism” (engaging with displays of conflict and atrocity) to exhibitions of conflict in museums and at memorial sites, as well as in advertising, film, journals, guidebooks, blogs, and photography. Focused on how war and tourism reinforce prevailing modes of domination, Holidays in the Danger Zone critically examines the long historical arc of the war-tourism nexus from nineteenth-century imperialism to World War I and World War II, from the Cold War to globalization and the War on Terror.