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This article examines the dreams of Jakob Vaarask (1862-1936), an Estonian Orthodox teacher and priest who, from 1889 to 1926, lived and worked on the island of Vormsi, for much of that period part of the Russian Empire's Estland province. I intend to show that dreams, rather than random and purely individual manifestations of the subconscious, can be used as historical sources, in Vaarask's case demonstrating the extent to which political propaganda and social hierarchies were internalised by individuals in the late Russian Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the global environmental science-policy interface has come to include a greater variety of knowledge. Social scientists have joined natural scientists at the policy table, and Indigenous and local knowledge is being taken ever more seriously. But this pluralisation raises political, normative, and epistemic challenges for environmental expert organisations, including with respect to how knowledge is managed, how it is judged to be valid, how it is made policy-relevant, and how it is presented to policy-makers and decision-takers. Based on an interview study of experts involved in the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), we identify three broad approaches to these challenges: the integrationist logic, which seeks to combine all knowledge into a single ontology; the parallelist, which looks for similarities and connections between irreconcilable ontologies; and the pragmatist, which strives to apply knowledge when and where it will have the greatest positive impact. Rather than champion any one of these approaches, the paper explores their origins and how they negotiate paralyses to the timeliness of work. In avoiding ultimate formalisation of how value and knowledge pluralism are to be handled, IPBES allow more contextually sensitive practices to come to the fore. The paper concludes by discussing implications for environmental expertise more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI). This article is interested not only in what is known about these risks, but what remains unknown and how that unknowing is and should be approached. By reviewing and expanding on the scientific literature, it explores how social knowledge contributes to the understanding of AI and its regulatory challenges. The analysis is conducted in three steps. First, the article investigates risks associated with AI and shows how social scientists have challenged technically-oriented approaches that treat the social instrumentally. It then identifies the invisible and visible characteristics of AI, and argues that not only is it hard for outsiders to comprehend risks attached to the technology, but also for developers and researchers. Finally, it asserts the need to better recognise ignorance of AI, and explores what this means for how their risks are handled. The article concludes by stressing that proper regulation demands not only independent social knowledge about the pervasiveness, economic embeddedness and fragmented regulation of AI, but a social non-knowledge that is attuned to its complexity, and inhuman and incomprehensible behaviour. In properly allowing for ignorance of its social implications, the regulation of AI can proceed in a more modest, situated, plural and ultimately robust manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the summer of 1866, the majority of the Swedish-speaking population on the Baltic island of Ruhnu (then part of the Russian Empire's Livland province) sought conversion from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy. Despite interest from the Russian secular and ecclesiastical authorities, however, the conversions did not take place. The islanders used the threat of conversion to leverage concessions from the Lutheran consistory: once achieved, the community lost any interest in pursuing Orthodoxy further. The following article analyses largely unknown sources from both Estonian and Swedish archives to show how the island's social structure and peculiar geographical position conditioned its inhabitants' religious choices, thereby providing insight into a previously unstudied instance of peasant agency in the Russian Empire and contributing to studies of that polity's environmental, ethnic, and confessional diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the First World War, Russian Old Believer priests of the Belokrinitsa hierarchy served their coreligionists as military chaplains on the various fronts of the conflict. However, Old Belief, a series of schismatic groups which had broken away from the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century, had only been fully legitimized by the imperial state in 1905: prior to this, they had been subjected to legal disabilities and persecution. This was particularly true of the Belokrinitsa hierarchy, whose foundation in 1846 had required the support of a foreign power. In this article, I offer a brief narrative of the hierarchy’s long road to social and political legitimacy and place the establishment of a military chaplaincy in this context. The Russian Orthodox Church successfully managed to prevent the Old Believers achieving an official chaplaincy before 1914, questioning their loyalty and the nature of their religious beliefs. However, the hierarchy was able to use the crises caused by the First World War to persuade the government that their frontline priests deserved official inclusion in the structures that oversaw the religious needs of non-Orthodox soldiers. Finally, I consider the duties and experiences of these priests and whether they led to the development of professional consciousness. In sum, this article shows how a marginalized religious minority was able to use the context of war to gain a greater degree of inclusion within imperial Russian society and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiments are presented here in analysis and depiction of Palynodata records. Palynodata, a database of pre-Quaternary records of fossil palynomorphs compiled from global literature, is now available as Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) Open File 5793. Palynodata is a non-random sample of the distributions of palynomorphs. Hence, for any taxon, occurrence records in Palynodata serve as a proxy for its 'real' distribution in geological time and paleogeographical space. These experiments may be useful starting points for students of palynology in their exploration of Palynodata records. Palynoplot software bins and plots Palynodata taxa retrievals by time, and by the modern latitude of the study sites. It uses geographical co-ordinates for the study localities in Palynodata and the geological time scale. Such plots reveal temporal and latitudinal distribution patterns, and potential taxonomic and data problems such as outliers and inconsistent taxonomy. Taxonomic studies can be supported by considering time by latitude distributions, in addition to traditional morphology and priorities. The modern latitude of the sites studied gives increasing distortion with geological age. Palynodata output and the study locality file was input for PaleoGIS software to depict occurrence records on paleogeographical maps. PaleoGIS software showed changing occurrence patterns on rotated plates. An experimental trend surface model of the Jurassic-Cretaceous transition used binned records of common filicale genera which were evolutionarily sensitive between 180 and 100 Ma. The results demonstrate potential for the technique, and lessons for interpretation and future refinement. Common taxa may become useful for biostratigraphical problems and, by calibration against reference sections, this technique might be refined to provide a useful biostratigraphical standard for geological system boundaries. These manipulations of Palynodata records are a 'proof-of-concept' demonstration of techniques that may help to reveal the biostratigraphical, paleoecological, and paleoclimatological significance of fossil palynomorphs. Such work also reveals desirable improvements in Palynodata. The precision of indexing species in Palynodata may limit the potential level of chronostratigraphical resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the arguments of Marini (1984), that the normative model of the life course, should not be used as a general example, in life course analysis and family development research. What this normative model of life course is based on; Outline of the arguments of Marini; Reason for the lack of response regarding Marini's arguments; Examination of the concepts of norm; Identification of the appropriate constructs at various levels of analysis.