Introduction: Martin Wight and the Political Philosophy of International Relations

This volume of Wight’s collected works brings together various writings concerning the political philosophy of international relations. Wight identified three traditions of thinking about international politics since the sixteenth century—Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism, which have become well known thanks to his 1991 posthumous volume, International Theory: The Three Traditions. The current volume includes several works on the same ‘international theory’ theme, some previously published and some never-before-published, with ‘Is There a Philosophy of Statesmanship?’ in the latter category. This volume also includes three essays by Wight on the causes and functions of war in international politics. Wight prepared several papers on legitimacy in domestic and international politics, and this volume features five never-before-published papers on this theme. Wight qualified his orderly analyses of traditions of political philosophy, the causes and functions of war, and principles of domestic and international legitimacy by drawing attention to unpredictable ‘wild card’ factors such as fortune and irony in his paper in this collection entitled ‘Fortune’s Banter’. Unintended, unexpected, and ironical consequences abound in international politics, despite efforts to master the dynamics of history. In view of the many factors behind events, including economic and demographic developments, Wight expressed qualifications about the role of ideas. He nonetheless concluded that ‘in historical retrospect, the philosophies of statesmen do seem observably to colour their policies’.

Teaching for Complex Systems Thinking

What do a short car trip, a pandemic, the wood-wide fungal web, a challenging learning experience, a storm, transport logistics, and the language(s) we speak have in common? All of them are systems, or multiple sets of systems within systems. What happens in any set of circumstances will depend on a mix of initial conditions, complexity dynamics, and the odd wild card (e.g., a chance event). While it is possible to model and predict what might or perhaps should happen, it is impossible to be certain. “It depends” thinking needs to be applied. Future-focused literature identifies complex systems thinking as an essential capability for citizenship, and this book sets out to show teachers how they might foster it—for themselves as well as for their students. There are implications for pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. Multiple examples show what changes might look like, for students of different ages, and in different subject contexts. This is a book of several layers: It is both practical and philosophical. There is explicit discussion of parallels between complexity science and indigenous knowledge systems (specifically mātauranga Māori in the New Zealand context). The many examples are designed to appeal to general readers with an interest in the complex challenges facing contemporary societies, as well as to teachers at all levels of the education system.

The wild card: colonial paper money in French North America, 1685 to 1719

We use the first French experiment with playing card money in its colony of Quebec between 1685 and 1719 to illustrate the link between legal tender restrictions and the price level. Initially, the quantity of playing card money and the government’s poor fiscal condition appears to have had little effect on prices. After 1705, however, the playing card money became inflationary. We argue that this was caused by the government’s increased enforcement of the legal tender laws and the adoption of a redemption plan intended to remove the notes from circulation.

Brazil's local polls boost centre-right hopes for 2022

Significance This group includes different parties that have offered some support to President Jair Bolsonaro without necessarily aligning themselves firmly with his government. Though Bolsonaro remains popular, candidates backed by him failed almost everywhere. The Workers’ Party (PT), for decades the hegemon on the centre-left, also fared extremely poorly, while fresh faces from other progressive forces raised their profiles in national politics. Impacts A broad centre-left and centre-right alliance could be the main wild card for 2022, as an attempt to prevent Bolsonaro’s re-election. A centre-right alliance in 2022 could founder on squabbles over who would lead the presidential ticket. Bolsonaro’s recent popularity may dwindle as fiscal constraints limit the possibility of continuing recent cash transfer payments.

Word pattern prediction using Big Data frameworks

Using software applications or services, which provide word or even word pattern recommendation service has become part of our lives. Those services appear in many form in our daily basis, just think of our smartphones keyboard, or Google search suggestions and this list can be continued. With the help of these tools, we can not only find the suitable word that fits into our sentence, but we can also express ourselves in a much more nuanced, diverse way. To achieve this kind of recommendation service, we use an algorithm which is capable to recommend word by word pattern queries. Word pattern queries, can be expressed as a combination of words, part-of-speech (POS) tags and wild card words. Since there are a lot of possible patterns and sentences, we use Big Data frameworks to handle this large amount of data. In this paper, we compared two popular framework Hadoop and Spark with the proposed algorithm and recommend some enhancement to gain faster word pattern generation.