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The Skeptic's Dictionary

The Skeptic's Dictionary is a collection of cross-referenced skeptical essays by Robert Todd Carroll, published on his website skepdic.com and in a printed book. The skepdic.com site was launched in 1994 and the book was published in 2003 with nearly 400 entries. As of January 2011 the website has over 700 entries. A comprehensive single-volume guides to skeptical information on pseudoscientific, paranormal, and occult topics, the bibliography contains some seven hundred references for more detailed information. According to the back cover of the book, the on-line version receives approximately 500,000 hits per month.

The Skeptic's Dictionary is, according to its foreword, intended to be a small counterbalance to the voluminous occult and paranormal literature; not to present a balanced view of occult subjects.

Contents
According to Carroll,
 * “The Skeptic’s Dictionary is aimed at four distinct audiences: the open-minded seeker, who makes no commitment to or disavowal of occult claims; the soft skeptic, who is more prone to doubt than to believe; the hardened skeptic, who has strong disbelief about all things occult; and the believing doubter, who is prone to believe but has some doubts. The one group this book is not aimed at is the 'true believer' in the occult. If you have no skepticism in you, this book is not for you.”

Carroll defines each of these categories, explaining how and why, in his opinion, his dictionary may be of interest, use, and benefit to each of them. He also defines the term “skepticism” as he uses it and identifies two types of skeptic, the Apollonian, who is “committed to clarity and rationality” and the Dionysian, who is “committed to passion and instinct.” William James, Bertrand Russell, and Friedrich Nietzsche exemplify the Apollonian skeptic, Carroll says, and Charles Sanders Peirce, Tertullian, Søren Kierkegaard, and Blaise Pascal are Dionysian skeptics.

The articles in the book are in several categories:

 * Alternative medicine
 * Cryptozoology
 * Extraterrestrials and UFOs
 * Frauds and hoaxes
 * Junk science and pseudoscience
 * Logic and perception
 * New Age beliefs
 * The paranormal and the occult
 * Science and philosophy
 * The supernatural and the metaphysical.

Print versions are available in Dutch, English, Japanese, Korean, and Russian. Numerous entries have been translated for the Internet in several other languages. A newsletter keeps interested parties up to date on new entries and an archived list of previous newsletters is available online. Norcross et al. state that Carroll has made considerable progress in exposing pseudoscience and quackery.

Reception
Roy Herbert's review of the paperback version written for the New Scientist magazine commented that "it is an amazing assembly, elegantly written and level-headed, with a wry remark here and there", and that "this superb work is likely to be used so often that it is a pity it is a softback book.". Skeptical Inquirer stated that it was "a book that should be a staple of everyone’s diet-part of the package we are given at birth to help us avoid the dangers and pitfalls of living in a world riddled with bad ideas and empty promises...". It was also described by Gary Jason, a Philosophy professor at California State University as "... a good reference book for a critical thinking class."

title: The Skeptic's Dictionary


text:
Talk:Aga Khan I

Title
Wasn't it the Perisan Shah that gave the title, not the British? —iFaqeer | Talk to me! 06:08, Oct 1, 2004 (UTC)
 * Yes, but the British recognized the title. Yeah, sorry for responding 4 years later, my apologies. -- Enzuru 01:41, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

What exactly was Aga Khans role in anglo afghan war
This part is not clear. What did he do how did he do it? 72.93.107.15 (talk) 00:52, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

How much pension and how long
How much pension did Aga Khan received and how long did the further aga khans received it. This bit is required to make it better. Its rumored that he received a larger pension than others, sources for that would be greatly apprcieated 72.93.107.15 (talk) 00:52, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Redirect
Not a regular editor, so I do not know how to do this, but it seems to be there should be a redirect to this page if you search Agha Khan I — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.26.35.196 (talk) 19:13, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Aga Khan I


text:
Violence

Violence is the use of physical force to cause harm to people, or non-human life, such as pain, injury, death, damage, or destruction. Some definitions are somewhat broader, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation."

Internationally, violence resulted in deaths of an estimated 1.28 million people in 2013, up from 1.13 million in 1990. However, the global population grew by roughly 1.9 billion during those years, showing a dramatic reduction in violence per capita. Of the deaths in 2013, roughly 842,000 were attributed to self-harm (suicide), 405,000 to interpersonal violence (homicide), and 31,000 to collective violence (war) and legal intervention. For each single death due to violence, there are dozens of hospitalizations, hundreds of emergency department visits, and thousands of doctors' appointments. Furthermore, violence often has lifelong consequences for physical and mental health and social functioning and can slow economic and social development.

In 2013, of the estimated 405,000 deaths due to interpersonal violence globally, assault by firearm was the cause in 180,000 deaths, assault by sharp object was the cause in 114,000 deaths, and the remaining 110,000 deaths from other causes.

Violence in many forms can be preventable. There is a strong relationship between levels of violence and modifiable factors in a country such as concentrated (regional) poverty, income and gender inequality, the harmful use of alcohol, and the absence of safe, stable, and nurturing relationships between children and parents. Strategies addressing the underlying causes of violence can be relatively effective in preventing violence, although mental and physical health and individual responses, personalities, etc. have always been decisive factors in the formation of these behaviors.

Types
The World Health Organization divides violence into three broad categories:
 * self-directed violence
 * interpersonal violence
 * collective violence

This initial categorization differentiates between violence that a person inflicts upon themself, violence inflicted by another individual or by a small group of individuals, and violence inflicted by larger groups such as states, organized political groups, militia groups and terrorist organizations.

Alternatively, violence can primarily be classified as either instrumental or reactive / hostile.

Self-directed
Self-directed violence is subdivided into suicidal behaviour and self-abuse. The former includes suicidal thoughts, attempted suicides—also called para suicide or deliberate self-injury in some countries—and suicide itself. Self-abuse, in contrast, includes acts such as self-mutilation.

Collective

Unlike the other two broad categories, the subcategories of collective violence suggest possible motives for violence committed by larger groups of individuals or by states. Collective violence that is committed to advance a particular social agenda includes, for example, crimes of hate committed by organized groups, terrorist acts and mob violence. Political violence includes war and related violent conflicts, state violence and similar acts carried out by armed groups. There may be multiple determinants of violence against civilians in such situations. Economic violence includes attacks motivated by economic gain—such as attacks carried out with the purpose of disrupting economic activity, denying access to essential services, or creating economic division and fragmentation. Clearly, acts committed by domestic and subnational groups can have multiple motives. Slow violence is a long-duration form of violence which is often invisible (at least to those not impacted by it), such as environmental degradation, pollution and climate change.

Warfare
War is a state of prolonged violent large-scale conflict involving two or more groups of people, usually under the auspices of government. It is the most extreme form of collective violence. War is fought as a means of resolving territorial and other conflicts, as war of aggression to conquer territory or loot resources, in national self-defence or liberation, or to suppress attempts of part of the nation to secede from it. There are also ideological, religious and revolutionary wars.

Since the Industrial Revolution the lethality of modern warfare has grown. World War I casualties were over 40 million and World War II casualties were over 70 million.

Interpersonal
Interpersonal violence is divided into two subcategories: Family and intimate partner violence—that is, violence largely between family members and intimate partners, usually, though not exclusively, taking place in the home. Community violence—violence between individuals who are unrelated, and who may or may not know each other, generally taking place outside the home. The former group includes forms of violence such as child abuse and child corporal punishment, intimate partner violence and abuse of the elderly. The latter includes youth violence, random acts of violence, rape or sexual assault by strangers, and violence in institutional settings such as schools, workplaces, prisons and nursing homes. When interpersonal violence occurs in families, its psychological consequences can affect parents, children, and their relationship in the short- and long-terms.

Child maltreatment
Child maltreatment is the abuse and neglect that occurs to children under 18 years of age. It includes all types of physical and/or emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect, negligence and commercial or other child exploitation, which results in actual or potential harm to the child's health, survival, development or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust, or power. Exposure to intimate partner violence is also sometimes included as a form of child maltreatment.

Child maltreatment is a global problem with serious lifelong consequences, which is, however, complex and difficult to study.

There are no reliable global estimates for the prevalence of child maltreatment. Data for many countries, especially low- and middle-income countries, are lacking. Current estimates vary widely depending on the country and the method of research used. Approximately 20% of women and 5–10% of men report being sexually abused as children, while 25–50% of all children report being physically abused.

Consequences of child maltreatment include impaired lifelong physical and mental health, and social and occupational functioning (e.g. school, job, and relationship difficulties). These can ultimately slow a country's economic and social development. Preventing child maltreatment before it starts is possible and requires a multisectoral approach. Effective prevention programmes support parents and teach positive parenting skills. Ongoing care of children and families can reduce the risk of maltreatment reoccurring and can minimize its consequences.

Youth

Following the World Health Organization, youth are defined as people between the ages of 10 and 29 years. Youth violence refers to violence occurring between youths, and includes acts that range from bullying and physical fighting, through more severe sexual and physical assault to homicide.

Worldwide some 250,000 homicides occur among youth 10–29 years of age each year, which is 41% of the total number of homicides globally each year ("Global Burden of Disease", World Health Organization, 2008). For each young person killed, 20–40 more sustain injuries requiring hospital treatment. Youth violence has a serious, often lifelong, impact on a person's psychological and social functioning. Youth violence greatly increases the costs of health, welfare and criminal justice services; reduces productivity; decreases the value of property; and generally undermines the fabric of society.

Prevention programmes shown to be effective or to have promise in reducing youth violence include life skills and social development programmes designed to help children and adolescents manage anger, resolve conflict, and develop the necessary social skills to solve problems; schools-based anti-bullying prevention programmes; and programmes to reduce access to alcohol, illegal drugs and guns. Also, given significant neighbourhood effects on youth violence, interventions involving relocating families to less poor environments have shown promising results. Similarly, urban renewal projects such as business improvement districts have shown a reduction in youth violence.

Different types of youth on youth violence include witnessing or being involved in physical, emotional and sexual abuse (e.g. physical attacks, bullying, rape), and violent acts like gang shootings and robberies. According to researchers in 2018, "More than half of children and adolescents living in cities have experienced some form of community violence." The violence "can also all take place under one roof, or in a given community or neighborhood and can happen at the same time or at different stages of life." Youth violence has immediate and long term adverse impact whether the individual was the recipient of the violence or a witness to it.

Youth violence impacts individuals, their families, and society. Victims can have lifelong injuries which means ongoing doctor and hospital visits, the cost of which quickly add up. Since the victims of youth-on-youth violence may not be able to attend school or work because of their physical and/or mental injuries, it is often up to their family members to take care of them, including paying their daily living expenses and medical bills. Their caretakers may have to give up their jobs or work reduced hours to provide help to the victim of violence. This causes a further burden on society because the victim and maybe even their caretakers have to obtain government assistance to help pay their bills. Recent research has found that psychological trauma during childhood can change a child's brain. "Trauma is known to physically affect the brain and the body which causes anxiety, rage, and the ability to concentrate. They can also have problems remembering, trusting, and forming relationships." Since the brain becomes used to violence it may stay continually in an alert state (similar to being stuck in the fight or flight mode). "Researchers claim that the youth who are exposed to violence may have emotional, social, and cognitive problems. They may have trouble controlling emotions, paying attention in school, withdraw from friends, or show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder".

It is important for youth exposed to violence to understand how their bodies may react so they can take positive steps to counteract any possible short- and long-term negative effects (e.g., poor concentration, feelings of depression, heightened levels of anxiety). By taking immediate steps to mitigate the effects of the trauma they've experienced, negative repercussions can be reduced or eliminated. As an initial step, the youths need to understand why they may be feeling a certain way and to understand how the violence they have experienced may be causing negative feelings and making them behave differently. Pursuing a greater awareness of their feelings, perceptions, and negative emotions is the first step that should be taken as part of recovering from the trauma they have experienced. "Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves".

Some of the ways to combat the adverse effects of exposure to youth violence would be to try various mindfulness and movement activities, deep breathing exercises and other actions that enable youths to release their pent up emotions. Using these techniques will teach body awareness, reduce anxiety and nervousness, and reduce feelings of anger and annoyance.

Youth who have experienced violence benefit from having a close relationship with one or more people. This is important because the trauma victims need to have people who are safe and trustworthy that they can relate and talk to about their horrible experiences. Some youth do not have adult figures at home or someone they can count on for guidance and comfort. Schools in bad neighborhoods where youth violence is prevalent should assign counselors to each student so that they receive regular guidance. In addition to counseling/therapy sessions and programs, it has been recommended that schools offer mentoring programs where students can interact with adults who can be a positive influence on them. Another way is to create more neighborhood programs to ensure that each child has a positive and stable place to go when school in not in session. Many children have benefited from formal organizations now which aim to help mentor and provide a safe environment for the youth especially those living in neighborhoods with higher rates of violence. This includes organizations such as Becoming a Man, CeaseFire Illinois, Chicago Area Project, Little Black Pearl, and Rainbow House". These programs are designed to help give the youth a safe place to go, stop the violence from occurring, offering counseling and mentoring to help stop the cycle of violence. If the youth do not have a safe place to go after school hours they will likely get into trouble, receive poor grades, drop out of school and use drugs and alcohol. The gangs look for youth who do not have positive influences in their life and need protection. This is why these programs are so important for the youth to have a safe environment rather than resorting to the streets.

Intimate partner

Population-level surveys based on reports from victims provide the most accurate estimates of the prevalence of intimate partner violence and sexual violence in non-conflict settings. A study conducted by WHO in 10 mainly developing countries found that, among women aged 15 to 49 years, between 15% (Japan) and 70% (Ethiopia and Peru) of women reported physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner. A growing body of research on men and intimate partner violence focuses on men as both perpetrators and victims of violence, as well as on how to involve men and boys in anti-violence work.

Intimate partner and sexual violence have serious short- and long-term physical, mental, sexual and reproductive health problems for victims and for their children, and lead to high social and economic costs. These include both fatal and non-fatal injuries, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, unintended pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.

Factors associated with the perpetration and experiencing of intimate partner violence are low levels of education, history of violence as a perpetrator, a victim or a witness of parental violence, harmful use of alcohol, attitudes that are accepting of violence as well as marital discord and dissatisfaction. Factors associated only with perpetration of intimate partner violence are having multiple partners, and antisocial personality disorder.

A recent theory named "The Criminal Spin" suggests a mutual flywheel effect between partners that is manifested by an escalation in the violence. A violent spin may occur in any other forms of violence, but in Intimate partner violence the added value is the mutual spin, based on the unique situation and characteristics of intimate relationship.

The primary prevention strategy with the best evidence for effectiveness for intimate partner violence is school-based programming for adolescents to prevent violence within dating relationships. Evidence is emerging for the effectiveness of several other primary prevention strategies—those that: combine microfinance with gender equality training; promote communication and relationship skills within communities; reduce access to, and the harmful use of alcohol; and change cultural gender norms.

Sexual
Sexual violence is any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed against a person's sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting. It includes rape, defined as the physically forced or otherwise coerced penetration of the vulva or anus with a penis, other body part or object.

Population-level surveys based on reports from victims estimate that between 0.3 and 11.5% of women reported experiencing sexual violence. Sexual violence has serious short- and long-term consequences on physical, mental, sexual and reproductive health for victims and for their children as described in the section on intimate partner violence. If perpetrated during childhood, sexual violence can lead to increased smoking, drug and alcohol misuse, and risky sexual behaviors in later life. It is also associated with perpetration of violence and being a victim of violence.

Many of the risk factors for sexual violence are the same as for domestic violence. Risk factors specific to sexual violence perpetration include beliefs in family honor and sexual purity, ideologies of male sexual entitlement and weak legal sanctions for sexual violence.

Few interventions to prevent sexual violence have been demonstrated to be effective. School-based programmes to prevent child sexual abuse by teaching children to recognize and avoid potentially sexually abusive situations are run in many parts of the world and appear promising, but require further research. To achieve lasting change, it is important to enact legislation and develop policies that protect women; address discrimination against women and promote gender equality; and help to move the culture away from violence.

Elder maltreatment
Elder maltreatment is a single or repeated act, or lack of appropriate action, occurring within any relationship where there is an expectation of trust which causes harm or distress to an older person.

While there is little information regarding the extent of maltreatment in elderly populations, especially in developing countries, it is estimated that 4–6% of elderly people in high-income countries have experienced some form of maltreatment at home However, older people are often afraid to report cases of maltreatment to family, friends, or to the authorities. Data on the extent of the problem in institutions such as hospitals, nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are scarce. Elder maltreatment can lead to serious physical injuries and long-term psychological consequences. Elder maltreatment is predicted to increase as many countries are experiencing rapidly ageing populations.

Many strategies have been implemented to prevent elder maltreatment and to take action against it and mitigate its consequences including public and professional awareness campaigns, screening (of potential victims and abusers), caregiver support interventions (e.g. stress management, respite care), adult protective services and self-help groups. Their effectiveness has, however, not so far been well-established.

Targeted
Several rare but painful episodes of assassination, attempted assassination and school shootings at elementary, middle, high schools, as well as colleges and universities in the United States, led to a considerable body of research on ascertainable behaviors of persons who have planned or carried out such attacks. These studies (1995–2002) investigated what the authors called "targeted violence," described the "path to violence" of those who planned or carried out attacks and laid out suggestions for law enforcement and educators. A major point from these research studies is that targeted violence does not just "come out of the blue".

Everyday
As an anthropological concept, "everyday violence" may refer to the incorporation of different forms of violence (mainly political violence) into daily practices. Latin America and the Caribbean, the region with the highest murder rate in the world, experienced more than 2.5 million murders between 2000 and 2017.

Philosophical perspectives
Some philosophers have argued that any interpretation of reality is intrinsically violent. Slavoj Žižek in his book Violence stated that "something violent is the very symbolization of a thing." An ontological perspective considers the harm inflicted by the very interpretation of the world as a form of violence that is distinct from physical violence in that it is possible to avoid physical violence whereas some ontological violence is intrinsic to all knowledge.

Both Foucault and Arendt considered the relationship between power and violence but concluded that while related they are distinct.

In feminist philosophy, epistemic violence is the act of causing harm by an inability to understand the conversation of others due to ignorance. Some philosophers think this will harm marginalized groups.

Brad Evans states that violence "represents a violation in the very conditions constituting what it means to be human as such", "is always an attack upon a person's dignity, their sense of selfhood, and their future", and "is both an ontological crime ... and a form of political ruination".

Factors and models of understanding
Violence cannot be attributed to solely protective factors or risk factors. Both of these factor groups are equally important in the prevention, intervention, and treatment of violence as a whole. The CDC outlines several risk and protective factors for youth violence at the individual, family, social and community levels.

Individual risk factors include poor behavioral control, high emotional stress, low IQ, and antisocial beliefs or attitudes. Family risk factors include authoritarian childrearing attitudes, inconsistent disciplinary practices, low emotional attachment to parents or caregivers, and low parental income and involvement. Social risk factors include social rejection, poor academic performance and commitment to school, and gang involvement or association with delinquent peers. Community risk factors include poverty, low community participation, and diminished economic opportunities.

On the other hand, individual protective factors include an intolerance towards deviance, higher IQ and GPA, elevated popularity and social skills, as well as religious beliefs. Family protective factors include a connectedness and ability to discuss issues with family members or adults, parent/family use of constructive coping strategies, and consistent parental presence during at least one of the following: when awakening, when arriving home from school, at dinner time, or when going to bed. Social protective factors include quality school relationships, close relationships with non-deviant peers, involvement in prosocial activities, and exposure to school climates that are: well supervised, use clear behavior rules and disciplinary approaches, and engage parents with teachers.

With many conceptual factors that occur at varying levels in the lives of those impacted, the exact causes of violence are complex. To represent this complexity, the ecological, or social ecological model is often used. The following four-level version of the ecological model is often used in the study of violence:

The first level identifies biological and personal factors that influence how individuals behave and increase their likelihood of becoming a victim or perpetrator of violence: demographic characteristics (age, education, income), genetics, brain lesions, personality disorders, substance abuse, and a history of experiencing, witnessing, or engaging in violent behaviour.

The second level focuses on close relationships, such as those with family and friends. In youth violence, for example, having friends who engage in or encourage violence can increase a young person's risk of being a victim or perpetrator of violence. For intimate partner violence, a consistent marker at this level of the model is marital conflict or discord in the relationship. In elder abuse, important factors are stress due to the nature of the past relationship between the abused person and the care giver.

The third level explores the community context—i.e., schools, workplaces, and neighbourhoods. Risk at this level may be affected by factors such as the existence of a local drug trade, the absence of social networks, and concentrated poverty. All these factors have been shown to be important in several types of violence.

Finally, the fourth level looks at the broad societal factors that help to create a climate in which violence is encouraged or inhibited: the responsiveness of the criminal justice system, social and cultural norms regarding gender roles or parent-child relationships, income inequality, the strength of the social welfare system, the social acceptability of violence, the availability of weapons, the exposure to violence in mass media, and political instability.

Child-rearing
While studies showing associations between physical punishment of children and later aggression cannot prove that physical punishment causes an increase in aggression, a number of longitudinal studies suggest that the experience of physical punishment has a direct causal effect on later aggressive behaviors. Cross-cultural studies have shown that greater prevalence of corporal punishment of children tends to predict higher levels of violence in societies. For instance, a 2005 analysis of 186 pre-industrial societies found that corporal punishment was more prevalent in societies which also had higher rates of homicide, assault, and war. In the United States, domestic corporal punishment has been linked to later violent acts against family members and spouses. The American family violence researcher Murray A. Straus believes that disciplinary spanking forms "the most prevalent and important form of violence in American families", whose effects contribute to several major societal problems, including later domestic violence and crime.

Psychology
The causes of violent behavior in people are often a topic of research in psychology. Neurobiologist Jan Vodka emphasizes that, for those purposes, "violent behavior is defined as overt and intentional physically aggressive behavior against another person."

Based on the idea of human nature, scientists do agree violence is inherent in humans. Among prehistoric humans, there is archaeological evidence for both contentions of violence and peacefulness as primary characteristics.

Since violence is a matter of perception as well as a measurable phenomenon, psychologists have found variability in whether people perceive certain physical acts as "violent". For example, in a state where execution is a legalized punishment we do not typically perceive the executioner as "violent", though we may talk, in a more metaphorical way, of the state acting violently. Likewise, understandings of violence are linked to a perceived aggressor-victim relationship: hence psychologists have shown that people may not recognise defensive use of force as violent, even in cases where the amount of force used is significantly greater than in the original aggression.

The concept of violence normalization is known as socially sanctioned, or structural violence and is a topic of increasing interest to researchers trying to understand violent behavior. It has been discussed at length by researchers in sociology, medical anthropology,  psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and bioarchaeology.

Evolutionary psychology offers several explanations for human violence in various contexts, such as sexual jealousy in humans, child abuse, and homicide. Goetz (2010) argues that humans are similar to most mammal species and use violence in specific situations. He writes that "Buss and Shackelford (1997a) proposed seven adaptive problems our ancestors recurrently faced that might have been solved by aggression: co-opting the resources of others, defending against attack, inflicting costs on same-sex rivals, negotiating status and hierarchies, deterring rivals from future aggression, deterring mate from infidelity, and reducing resources expended on genetically unrelated children."

Goetz writes that most homicides seem to start from relatively trivial disputes between unrelated men who then escalate to violence and death. He argues that such conflicts occur when there is a status dispute between men of relatively similar status. If there is a great initial status difference, then the lower status individual usually offers no challenge and if challenged the higher status individual usually ignores the lower status individual. At the same an environment of great inequalities between people may cause those at the bottom to use more violence in attempts to gain status.

Media
Research into the media and violence examines whether links between consuming media violence and subsequent aggressive and violent behaviour exists. Although some scholars had claimed media violence may increase aggression, this view is coming increasingly in doubt both in the scholarly community and was rejected by the US Supreme Court in the Brown v EMA case, as well as in a review of video game violence by the Australian Government (2010) which concluded evidence for harmful effects were inconclusive at best and the rhetoric of some scholars was not matched by good data.

Prevention
The threat and enforcement of physical punishment has been a tried and tested method of preventing some violence since civilisation began. It is used in various degrees in most countries.

Public awareness campaigns
Cities and counties throughout the United States organize "Violence Prevention Months" where the mayor, by proclamation, or the county, by a resolution, encourage the private, community and public sectors to engage in activities that raise awareness that violence is not acceptable through art, music, lectures and events. For example, Violence Prevention Month coordinator, Karen Earle Lile in Contra Costa County, California created a Wall of Life, where children drew pictures that were put up in the walls of banks and public spaces, displaying a child's view of violence they had witnessed and how it affected them, in an effort to draw attention to how violence affects the community, not just the people involved.

Interpersonal violence
A review of scientific literature by the World Health Organization on the effectiveness of strategies to prevent interpersonal violence identified the seven strategies below as being supported by either strong or emerging evidence for effectiveness. These strategies target risk factors at all four levels of the ecological model.

Child–caregiver relationships
Among the most effective such programmes to prevent child maltreatment and reduce childhood aggression are the Nurse Family Partnership home-visiting programme and the Triple P (Parenting Program). There is also emerging evidence that these programmes reduce convictions and violent acts in adolescence and early adulthood, and probably help decrease intimate partner violence and self-directed violence in later life.

Life skills in youth
Evidence shows that the life skills acquired in social development programmes can reduce involvement in violence, improve social skills, boost educational achievement and improve job prospects. Life skills refer to social, emotional, and behavioural competencies which help children and adolescents effectively deal with the challenges of everyday life.

Gender equality
Evaluation studies are beginning to support community interventions that aim to prevent violence against women by promoting gender equality. For instance, evidence suggests that programmes that combine microfinance with gender equity training can reduce intimate partner violence. School-based programmes such as Safe Dates programme in the United States of America and the Youth Relationship Project in Canada have been found to be effective for reducing dating violence.

Cultural norms
Rules or expectations of behaviour – norms – within a cultural or social group can encourage violence. Interventions that challenge cultural and social norms supportive of violence can prevent acts of violence and have been widely used, but the evidence base for their effectiveness is currently weak. The effectiveness of interventions addressing dating violence and sexual abuse among teenagers and young adults by challenging social and cultural norms related to gender is supported by some evidence.

Support programmes
Interventions to identify victims of interpersonal violence and provide effective care and support are critical for protecting health and breaking cycles of violence from one generation to the next. Examples for which evidence of effectiveness is emerging includes: screening tools to identify victims of intimate partner violence and refer them to appropriate services; psychosocial interventions—such as trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy—to reduce mental health problems associated with violence, including post-traumatic stress disorder; and protection orders, which prohibit a perpetrator from contacting the victim, to reduce repeat victimization among victims of intimate partner violence.

Collective violence
Not surprisingly, scientific evidence about the effectiveness of interventions to prevent collective violence is lacking. However, policies that facilitate reductions in poverty, that make decision-making more accountable, that reduce inequalities between groups, as well as policies that reduce access to biological, chemical, nuclear and other weapons have been recommended. When planning responses to violent conflicts, recommended approaches include assessing at an early stage who is most vulnerable and what their needs are, co-ordination of activities between various players and working towards global, national and local capabilities so as to deliver effective health services during the various stages of an emergency.

Criminal justice
One of the main functions of law is to regulate violence. Sociologist Max Weber stated that the state claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force to cause harm practised within the confines of a specific territory. Law enforcement is the main means of regulating nonmilitary violence in society. Governments regulate the use of violence through legal systems governing individuals and political authorities, including the police and military. Civil societies authorize some amount of violence, exercised through the police power, to maintain the status quo and enforce laws.

However, German political theorist Hannah Arendt noted: "Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate ... Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions the use of violence in self-defence, because the danger is not only clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is immediate". Arendt made a clear distinction between violence and power. Most political theorists regarded violence as an extreme manifestation of power whereas Arendt regarded the two concepts as opposites. In the 20th century in acts of democide governments may have killed more than 260 million of their own people through police brutality, execution, massacre, slave labour camps, and sometimes through intentional famine.

Violent acts that are not carried out by the military or police and that are not in self-defense are usually classified as crimes, although not all crimes are violent crimes. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) classifies violence resulting in homicide into criminal homicide and justifiable homicide (e.g. self-defense).

The criminal justice approach sees its main task as enforcing laws that proscribe violence and ensuring that "justice is done". The notions of individual blame, responsibility, guilt, and culpability are central to criminal justice's approach to violence and one of the criminal justice system's main tasks is to "do justice", i.e. to ensure that offenders are properly identified, that the degree of their guilt is as accurately ascertained as possible, and that they are punished appropriately. To prevent and respond to violence, the criminal justice approach relies primarily on deterrence, incarceration and the punishment and rehabilitation of perpetrators.

The criminal justice approach, beyond justice and punishment, has traditionally emphasized indicated interventions, aimed at those who have already been involved in violence, either as victims or as perpetrators. One of the main reasons offenders are arrested, prosecuted, and convicted is to prevent further crimes—through deterrence (threatening potential offenders with criminal sanctions if they commit crimes), incapacitation (physically preventing offenders from committing further crimes by locking them up) and through rehabilitation (using time spent under state supervision to develop skills or change one's psychological make-up to reduce the likelihood of future offences).

In recent decades in many countries in the world, the criminal justice system has taken an increasing interest in preventing violence before it occurs. For instance, much of community and problem-oriented policing aims to reduce crime and violence by altering the conditions that foster it—and not to increase the number of arrests. Indeed, some police leaders have gone so far as to say the police should primarily be a crime prevention agency. Juvenile justice systems—an important component of criminal justice systems—are largely based on the belief in rehabilitation and prevention. In the US, the criminal justice system has, for instance, funded school- and community-based initiatives to reduce children's access to guns and teach conflict resolution. Despite this, force is used routinely against juveniles by police. In 1974, the US Department of Justice assumed primary responsibility for delinquency prevention programmes and created the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which has supported the "Blueprints for violence prevention" programme at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Public health
The public health approach is a science-driven, population-based, interdisciplinary, intersectoral approach based on the ecological model which emphasizes primary prevention. Rather than focusing on individuals, the public health approach aims to provide the maximum benefit for the largest number of people, and to extend better care and safety to entire populations. The public health approach is interdisciplinary, drawing upon knowledge from many disciplines including medicine, epidemiology, sociology, psychology, criminology, education and economics. Because all forms of violence are multi-faceted problems, the public health approach emphasizes a multi-sectoral response. It has been proved time and again that cooperative efforts from such diverse sectors as health, education, social welfare, and criminal justice are often necessary to solve what are usually assumed to be purely "criminal" or "medical" problems. The public health approach considers that violence, rather than being the result of any single factor, is the outcome of multiple risk factors and causes, interacting at four levels of a nested hierarchy (individual, close relationship/family, community and wider society) of the Social ecological model.

From a public health perspective, prevention strategies can be classified into three types:
 * Primary prevention – approaches that aim to prevent violence before it occurs.
 * Secondary prevention – approaches that focus on the more immediate responses to violence, such as pre-hospital care, emergency services or treatment for sexually transmitted infections following a rape.
 * Tertiary prevention – approaches that focus on long-term care in the wake of violence, such as rehabilitation and reintegration, and attempt to lessen trauma or reduce long-term disability associated with violence.

A public health approach emphasizes the primary prevention of violence, i.e. stopping them from occurring in the first place. Until recently, this approach has been relatively neglected in the field, with the majority of resources directed towards secondary or tertiary prevention. Perhaps the most critical element of a public health approach to prevention is the ability to identify underlying causes rather than focusing upon more visible "symptoms". This allows for the development and testing of effective approaches to address the underlying causes and so improve health.

The public health approach is an evidence-based and systematic process involving the following four steps:
 * 1) Defining the problem conceptually and numerically, using statistics that accurately describe the nature and scale of violence, the characteristics of those most affected, the geographical distribution of incidents, and the consequences of exposure to such violence.
 * 2) Investigating why the problem occurs by determining its causes and correlates, the factors that increase or decrease the risk of its occurrence (risk and protective factors) and the factors that might be modifiable through intervention.
 * 3) Exploring ways to prevent the problem by using the above information and designing, monitoring and rigorously assessing the effectiveness of programmes through outcome evaluations.
 * 4) Disseminating information on the effectiveness of programmes and increasing the scale of proven effective programmes. Approaches to prevent violence, whether targeted at individuals or entire communities, must be properly evaluated for their effectiveness and the results shared. This step also includes adapting programmes to local contexts and subjecting them to rigorous re-evaluation to ensure their effectiveness in the new setting.

In many countries, violence prevention is still a new or emerging field in public health. The public health community has started only recently to realize the contributions it can make to reducing violence and mitigating its consequences. In 1949, Gordon called for injury prevention efforts to be based on the understanding of causes, in a similar way to prevention efforts for communicable and other diseases. In 1962, Gomez, referring to the WHO definition of health, stated that it is obvious that violence does not contribute to "extending life" or to a "complete state of well-being". He defined violence as an issue that public health experts needed to address and stated that it should not be the primary domain of lawyers, military personnel, or politicians.

However, it is only in the last 30 years that public health has begun to address violence, and only in the last fifteen has it done so at the global level. This is a much shorter period of time than public health has been tackling other health problems of comparable magnitude and with similarly severe lifelong consequences.

The global public health response to interpersonal violence began in earnest in the mid-1990s. In 1996, the World Health Assembly adopted Resolution WHA49.25 which declared violence "a leading worldwide public health problem" and requested that the World Health Organization (WHO) initiate public health activities to (1) document and characterize the burden of violence, (2) assess the effectiveness of programmes, with particular attention to women and children and community-based initiatives, and (3) promote activities to tackle the problem at the international and national levels. The World Health Organization's initial response to this resolution was to create the Department of Violence and Injury Prevention and Disability and to publish the World report on violence and health (2002).

The case for the public health sector addressing interpersonal violence rests on four main arguments. First, the significant amount of time health care professionals dedicate to caring for victims and perpetrators of violence has made them familiar with the problem and has led many, particularly in emergency departments, to mobilize to address it. The information, resources, and infrastructures the health care sector has at its disposal are an important asset for research and prevention work. Second, the magnitude of the problem and its potentially severe lifelong consequences and high costs to individuals and wider society call for population-level interventions typical of the public health approach. Third, the criminal justice approach, the other main approach to addressing violence (link to entry above), has traditionally been more geared towards violence that occurs between male youths and adults in the street and other public places—which makes up the bulk of homicides in most countries—than towards violence occurring in private settings such as child maltreatment, intimate partner violence and elder abuse—which makes up the largest share of non-fatal violence. Fourth, evidence is beginning to accumulate that a science-based public health approach is effective at preventing interpersonal violence.

Human rights
The human rights approach is based on the obligations of states to respect, protect and fulfill human rights and therefore to prevent, eradicate and punish violence. It recognizes violence as a violation of many human rights: the rights to life, liberty, autonomy and security of the person; the rights to equality and non-discrimination; the rights to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment; the right to privacy; and the right to the highest attainable standard of health. These human rights are enshrined in international and regional treaties and national constitutions and laws, which stipulate the obligations of states, and include mechanisms to hold states accountable. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, for example, requires that countries party to the Convention take all appropriate steps to end violence against women. The Convention on the Rights of the Child in its Article 19 states that States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child.

Geographical context
Violence, as defined in the dictionary of human geography, "appears whenever power is in jeopardy" and "in and of itself stands emptied of strength and purpose: it is part of a larger matrix of socio-political power struggles". Violence can be broadly divided into three broad categories—direct violence, structural violence and cultural violence. Thus defined and delineated, it is of note, as Hyndman says, that "geography came late to theorizing violence" in comparison to other social sciences. Social and human geography, rooted in the humanist, Marxist, and feminist subfields that emerged following the early positivist approaches and subsequent behavioral turn, have long been concerned with social and spatial justice. Along with critical geographers and political geographers, it is these groupings of geographers that most often interact with violence. Keeping this idea of social/spatial justice via geography in mind, it is worthwhile to look at geographical approaches to violence in the context of politics.

Derek Gregory and Alan Pred assembled the influential edited collection Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, which demonstrates how place, space, and landscape are foremost factors in the real and imagined practices of organized violence both historically and in the present. Evidently, political violence often gives a part for the state to play. When "modern states not only claim a monopoly of the legitimate means of violence; they also routinely use the threat of violence to enforce the rule of law", the law not only becomes a form of violence but is violence. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben's concepts of state of exception and homo sacer are useful to consider within a geography of violence. The state, in the grip of a perceived, potential crisis (whether legitimate or not) takes preventative legal measures, such as a suspension of rights (it is in this climate, as Agamben demonstrates, that the formation of the Social Democratic and Nazi government's lager or concentration camp can occur). However, when this "in limbo" reality is designed to be in place "until further notice…the state of exception thus ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself". For Agamben, the physical space of the camp "is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space". At the scale of the body, in the state of exception, a person is so removed from their rights by "juridical procedures and deployments of power" that "no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime"; in other words, people become only homo sacer. Guantanamo Bay could also be said to represent the physicality of the state of exception in space, and can just as easily draw man as homo sacer.

In the 1970s, genocides in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot resulted in the deaths of over two million Cambodians (which was 25% of the Cambodian population), forming one of the many contemporary examples of state-sponsored violence. About fourteen thousand of these murders occurred at Choeung Ek, which is the best-known of the extermination camps referred to as the Killing Fields. The killings were arbitrary; for example, a person could be killed for wearing glasses, since that was seen as associating them with intellectuals and therefore as making them part of the enemy. People were murdered with impunity because it was no crime; Cambodians were made homo sacer in a condition of bare life. The Killing Fields—manifestations of Agamben's concept of camps beyond the normal rule of law—featured the state of exception. As part of Pol Pot's "ideological intent…to create a purely agrarian society or cooperative", he "dismantled the country's existing economic infrastructure and depopulated every urban area". Forced movement, such as this forced movement applied by Pol Pot, is a clear display of structural violence. When "symbols of Cambodian society were equally disrupted, social institutions of every kind…were purged or torn down", cultural violence (defined as when "any aspect of culture such as language, religion, ideology, art, or cosmology is used to legitimize direct or structural violence" ) is added to the structural violence of forced movement and to the direct violence, such as murder, at the Killing Fields. Vietnam eventually intervened and the genocide officially ended. However, ten million landmines left by opposing guerillas in the 1970s continue to create a violent landscape in Cambodia.

Human geography, though coming late to the theorizing table, has tackled violence through many lenses, including anarchist geography, feminist geography, Marxist geography, political geography, and critical geography. However, Adriana Cavarero notes that, "as violence spreads and assumes unheard-of forms, it becomes difficult to name in contemporary language". Cavarero proposes that, in facing such a truth, it is prudent to reconsider violence as "horrorism"; that is, "as though ideally all the…victims, instead of their killers, ought to determine the name". With geography often adding the forgotten spatial aspect to theories of social science, rather than creating them solely within the discipline, it seems that the self-reflexive contemporary geography of today may have an extremely important place in this current (re)imaging of violence, exemplified by Cavarero.

Epidemiology
As of 2010, all forms of violence resulted in about 1.34 million deaths up from about 1 million in 1990. Suicide accounts for about 883,000, interpersonal violence for 456,000 and collective violence for 18,000. Deaths due to collective violence have decreased from 64,000 in 1990.

By way of comparison, the 1.5 millions deaths a year due to violence is greater than the number of deaths due to tuberculosis (1.34 million), road traffic injuries (1.21 million), and malaria (830'000), but slightly less than the number of people who die from HIV/AIDS (1.77 million).

For every death due to violence, there are numerous nonfatal injuries. In 2008, over 16 million cases of non-fatal violence-related injuries were severe enough to require medical attention. Beyond deaths and injuries, forms of violence such as child maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and elder maltreatment have been found to be highly prevalent.

Self-directed violence
In the last 45 years, suicide rates have increased by 60% worldwide. Suicide is among the three leading causes of death among those aged 15–44 years in some countries, and the second leading cause of death in the 10–24 years age group. These figures do not include suicide attempts which are up to 20 times more frequent than suicide. Suicide was the 16th leading cause of death worldwide in 2004 and is projected to increase to the 12th in 2030. Although suicide rates have traditionally been highest among the male elderly, rates among young people have been increasing to such an extent that they are now the group at highest risk in a third of countries, in both developed and developing countries.

Interpersonal violence
Rates and patterns of violent death vary by country and region. In recent years, homicide rates have been highest in developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean and lowest in East Asia, the western Pacific, and some countries in northern Africa. Studies show a strong, inverse relationship between homicide rates and both economic development and economic equality. Poorer countries, especially those with large gaps between the rich and the poor, tend to have higher rates of homicide than wealthier countries. Homicide rates differ markedly by age and sex. Gender differences are least marked for children. For the 15 to 29 age group, male rates were nearly six times those for female rates; for the remaining age groups, male rates were from two to four times those for females.

Studies in a number of countries show that, for every homicide among young people age 10 to 24, 20 to 40 other young people receive hospital treatment for a violent injury.

Forms of violence such as child maltreatment and intimate partner violence are highly prevalent. Approximately 20% of women and 5–10% of men report being sexually abused as children, while 25–50% of all children report being physically abused. A WHO multi-country study found that between 15 and 71% of women reported experiencing physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner at some point in their lives.

Collective violence
Wars grab headlines, but the individual risk of dying violently in an armed conflict is today relatively low—much lower than the risk of violent death in many countries that are not suffering from an armed conflict. For example, between 1976 and 2008, African Americans were victims of 329,825 homicides. Although there is a widespread perception that war is the most dangerous form of armed violence in the world, the average person living in a conflict-affected country had a risk of dying violently in the conflict of about 2.0 per 100,000 population between 2004 and 2007. This can be compared to the average world homicide rate of 7.6 per 100,000 people. This illustration highlights the value of accounting for all forms of armed violence rather than an exclusive focus on conflict related violence. Certainly, there are huge variations in the risk of dying from armed conflict at the national and subnational level, and the risk of dying violently in a conflict in specific countries remains extremely high. In Iraq, for example, the direct conflict death rate for 2004–07 was 65 per 100,000 people per year and, in Somalia, 24 per 100,000 people. This rate even reached peaks of 91 per 100,000 in Iraq in 2006 and 74 per 100,000 in Somalia in 2007.

History
Scientific evidence for warfare has come from settled, sedentary communities. Some studies argue humans have a predisposition for violence (chimpanzees, also great apes, have been known to kill members of competing groups for resources like food). A comparison across mammal species found that humans have a paleolithic adult homicide rate of about 2%. This would be lower than some other animals, but still high. However, this study took into account the infanticide rate by some other animals such as meerkats, but not of humans, where estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Other evidence suggests that organized, large-scale, militaristic, or regular human-on-human violence was absent for the vast majority of the human timeline, and is first documented to have started only relatively recently in the Holocene, an epoch that began about 11,700 years ago, probably with the advent of higher population densities due to sedentism. Social anthropologist Douglas P. Fry writes that scholars are divided on the origins of possible increase of violence—in other words, war-like behavior: "There are basically two schools of thought on this issue. One holds that warfare... goes back at least to the time of the first thoroughly modern humans and even before then to the primate ancestors of the hominid lineage. The second positions on the origins of warfare sees war as much less common in the cultural and biological evolution of humans. Here, warfare is a latecomer on the cultural horizon, only arising in very specific material circumstances and being quite rare in human history until the development of agriculture in the past 10,000 years."

Jared Diamond in his books Guns, Germs and Steel and The Third Chimpanzee posits that the rise of large-scale warfare is the result of advances in technology and city-states. For instance, the rise of agriculture provided a significant increase in the number of individuals that a region could sustain over hunter-gatherer societies, allowing for development of specialized classes such as soldiers, or weapons manufacturers. In academia, the idea of the peaceful pre-history and non-violent tribal societies gained popularity with the post-colonial perspective. The trend, starting in archaeology and spreading to anthropology reached its height in the late half of the 20th century. However, some newer research in archaeology and bioarchaeology may provide evidence that violence within and among groups is not a recent phenomenon. According to the book "The Bioarchaeology of Violence" violence is a behavior that is found throughout human history.

Lawrence H. Keeley at the University of Illinois writes in War Before Civilization that 87% of tribal societies were at war more than once per year, and that 65% of them were fighting continuously. He writes that the attrition rate of numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize endemic warfare, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare. "Primitive Warfare" of these small groups or tribes was driven by the basic need for sustenance and violent competition.

Fry explores Keeley's argument in depth and counters that such sources erroneously focus on the ethnography of hunters and gatherers in the present, whose culture and values have been infiltrated externally by modern civilization, rather than the actual archaeological record spanning some two million years of human existence. Fry determines that all present ethnographically studied tribal societies, "by the very fact of having been described and published by anthropologists, have been irrevocably impacted by history and modern colonial nation states" and that "many have been affected by state societies for at least 5000 years."

The relatively peaceful period since World War II is known as the Long Peace.

The Better Angels of Our Nature
Steven Pinker's 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, argued that modern society is less violent than in periods of the past, whether on the short scale of decades or long scale of centuries or millennia. He argues for a paleolithic homicide rate of 15%.

Steven Pinker argues that by every possible measure, every type of violence has drastically decreased since ancient and medieval times. A few centuries ago, for example, genocide was a standard practice in all kinds of warfare and was so common that historians did not even bother to mention it. Cannibalism and slavery have been greatly reduced in the last thousand years, and capital punishment is now banned in many countries. According to Pinker, rape, murder, warfare and animal cruelty have all seen drastic declines in the 20th century. Pinker's analyses have also been criticized, concerning the statistical question of how to measure violence and whether it is in fact declining.

Pinker's observation of the decline in interpersonal violence echoes the work of Norbert Elias, who attributes the decline to a "civilizing process", in which the state's monopolization of violence, the maintenance of socioeconomic interdependencies or "figurations", and the maintenance of behavioural codes in culture all contribute to the development of individual sensibilities, which increase the repugnance of individuals towards violent acts. According to a 2010 study, non-lethal violence, such as assaults or bullying appear to be declining as well.

Some scholars disagree with the argument that all violence is decreasing arguing that not all types of violent behaviour are lower now than in the past. They suggest that research typically focuses on lethal violence, often looks at homicide rates of death due to warfare, but ignore the less obvious forms of violence.

Society and culture

Beyond deaths and injuries, highly prevalent forms of violence (such as child maltreatment and intimate partner violence) have serious lifelong non-injury health consequences. Victims may engage in high-risk behaviours such as alcohol and substance misuse and smoking, which in turn can contribute to cardiovascular disorders, cancers, depression, diabetes and HIV/AIDS, resulting in premature death. The balances of prevention, mitigation, mediation and exacerbation are complex, and vary with the underpinnings of violence.

Economic effects
In countries with high levels of violence, economic growth can be slowed down, personal and collective security eroded, and social development impeded. Families edging out of poverty and investing in schooling their sons and daughters can be ruined through the violent death or severe disability of the main breadwinner. Communities can be caught in poverty traps where pervasive violence and deprivation form a vicious circle that stifles economic growth. For societies, meeting the direct costs of health, criminal justice, and social welfare responses to violence diverts many billions of dollars from more constructive societal spending. The much larger indirect costs of violence due to lost productivity and lost investment in education work together to slow economic development, increase socioeconomic inequality, and erode human and social capital.

Additionally, communities with high level of violence do not provide the level of stability and predictability vital for a prospering business economy. Individuals will be less likely to invest money and effort towards growth in such unstable and violent conditions. One of the possible proves might be the study of Baten and Gust that used "regicide" as measurement unit to approximate the influence of interpersonal violence and depict the influence of high interpersonal violence on economic development and level of investments. The results of the research prove the correlation of the human capital and the interpersonal violence.

In 2016, the Institute for Economics and Peace, released the Economic Value of Peace report, which estimates the economic impact of violence and conflict on the global economy, the total economic impact of violence on the world economy in 2015 was estimated to be $13.6 trillion in purchasing power parity terms.

Religion and politics
Religious and political ideologies have been the cause of interpersonal violence throughout history. Ideologues often falsely accuse others of violence, such as the ancient blood libel against Jews, the medieval accusations of casting witchcraft spells against women, and modern accusations of satanic ritual abuse against day care center owners and others.

Both supporters and opponents of the 21st-century War on Terrorism regard it largely as an ideological and religious war.

Vittorio Bufacchi describes two different modern concepts of violence, one the "minimalist conception" of violence as an intentional act of excessive or destructive force, the other the "comprehensive conception" which includes violations of rights, including a long list of human needs.

Anti-capitalists say that capitalism is violent, that private property and profit survive only because police violence defends them, and that capitalist economies need war to expand. In this view, capitalism results in a form of structural violence that stems from inequality, environmental damage, and the exploitation of women and people of colour.

Frantz Fanon critiqued the violence of colonialism and wrote about the counter violence of the "colonized victims."

Throughout history, most religions and individuals like Mahatma Gandhi have preached that humans are capable of eliminating individual violence and organizing societies through purely nonviolent means. Gandhi himself once wrote: "A society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy." Modern political ideologies which espouse similar views include pacifist varieties of voluntarism, mutualism, anarchism and libertarianism.

Luther Seminary Old Testament scholar Terence E. Fretheim wrote about the Old Testament: "For many people, ... only physical violence truly qualifies as violence. But, certainly, violence is more than killing people, unless one includes all those words and actions that kill people slowly. The effect of limitation to a 'killing fields' perspective is the widespread neglect of many other forms of violence. We must insist that violence also refers to that which is psychologically destructive, that which demeans, damages, or depersonalizes others. In view of these considerations, violence may be defined as follows: any action, verbal or nonverbal, oral or written, physical or psychical, active or passive, public or private, individual or institutional/societal, human or divine, in whatever degree of intensity, that abuses, violates, injures, or kills. Some of the most pervasive and most dangerous forms of violence are those that are often hidden from view (against women and children, especially); just beneath the surface in many of our homes, churches, and communities is abuse enough to freeze the blood. Moreover, many forms of systemic violence often slip past our attention because they are so much a part of the infrastructure of life (e.g., racism, sexism, ageism)."

title: Violence


text:
Eratosthenes

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (Ἐρατοσθένης ; c. 276 BC – c. 195/194 BC) was a Greek polymath: a mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. His work is comparable to what is now known as the study of geography, and he introduced some of the terminology still used today.

He is best known for being the first person known to calculate the circumference of the Earth, which he did by using the extensive survey results he could access in his role at the Library. His calculation was remarkably accurate. He was also the first to calculate Earth's axial tilt, which has also proved to have remarkable accuracy. He created the first global projection of the world, incorporating parallels and meridians based on the available geographic knowledge of his era.

Eratosthenes was the founder of scientific chronology; he used Egyptian and Persian records to estimate the dates of the main events of the Trojan War, dating the sack of Troy to 1183 BC. In number theory, he introduced the sieve of Eratosthenes, an efficient method of identifying prime numbers and composite numbers.

He was a figure of influence in many fields who yearned to understand the complexities of the entire world. His devotees nicknamed him Pentathlos after the Olympians who were well rounded competitors, for he had proven himself to be knowledgeable in every area of learning. Yet, according to an entry in the Suda (a 10th-century encyclopedia), some critics scorned him, calling him Number 2 because he always came in second in all his endeavours.

Life
The son of Aglaos, Eratosthenes was born in 276 BC in Cyrene. Now part of modern-day Libya, Cyrene had been founded by Greeks centuries earlier and became the capital of Pentapolis (North Africa), a country of five cities: Cyrene, Arsinoe, Berenice, Ptolemias, and Apollonia. Alexander the Great conquered Cyrene in 332 BC, and following his death in 323 BC, its rule was given to one of his generals, Ptolemy I Soter, the founder of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Under Ptolemaic rule the economy prospered, based largely on the export of horses and silphium, a plant used for rich seasoning and medicine. Cyrene became a place of cultivation, where knowledge blossomed. Like any young Greek at the time, Eratosthenes would have studied in the local gymnasium, where he would have learned physical skills and social discourse as well as reading, writing, arithmetic, poetry, and music.

Eratosthenes went to Athens to further his studies. There he was taught Stoicism by its founder, Zeno of Citium, in philosophical lectures on living a virtuous life. He then studied under Aristo of Chios, who led a more cynical school of philosophy. He also studied under the head of the Platonic Academy, who was Arcesilaus of Pitane. His interest in Plato led him to write his first work at a scholarly level, Platonikos, inquiring into the mathematical foundation of Plato's philosophies. Eratosthenes was a man of many perspectives and investigated the art of poetry under Callimachus. He wrote poems: one in hexameters called Hermes, illustrating the god's life history; and another in elegiacs, called Erigone, describing the suicide of the Athenian maiden Erigone (daughter of Icarius). He wrote Chronographies, a text that scientifically depicted dates of importance, beginning with the Trojan War. This work was highly esteemed for its accuracy. George Syncellus was later able to preserve from Chronographies a list of 38 kings of the Egyptian Thebes. Eratosthenes also wrote Olympic Victors, a chronology of the winners of the Olympic Games. It is not known when he wrote his works, but they highlighted his abilities.

These works and his great poetic abilities led the king Ptolemy III Euergetes to seek to place him as a librarian at the Library of Alexandria in the year 245 BC. Eratosthenes, then thirty years old, accepted Ptolemy's invitation and traveled to Alexandria, where he lived for the rest of his life. Within about fifty years he became Chief Librarian, a position that the poet Apollonius Rhodius had previously held. As head of the library Eratosthenes tutored the children of Ptolemy, including Ptolemy IV Philopator who became the fourth Ptolemaic pharaoh. He expanded the library's holdings: in Alexandria all books had to be surrendered for duplication. It was said that these were copied so accurately that it was impossible to tell if the library had returned the original or the copy. He sought to maintain the reputation of the Library of Alexandria against competition from the Library of Pergamum. Eratosthenes created a whole section devoted to the examination of Homer, and acquired original works of great tragic dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Eratosthenes made several important contributions to mathematics and science, and was a friend of Archimedes. Around 255 BC, he invented the armillary sphere. In On the Circular Motions of the Celestial Bodies, Cleomedes credited him with having calculated the Earth's circumference around 240 BC, with high accuracy.

Eratosthenes believed there was both good and bad in every nation and criticized Aristotle for arguing that humanity was divided into Greeks and barbarians, as well as for arguing that the Greeks should keep themselves racially pure. As he aged, he contracted ophthalmia, becoming blind around 195 BC. Losing the ability to read and to observe nature plagued and depressed him, leading him to voluntarily starve himself to death. He died in 194 BC at the age of 82 in Alexandria.

Measurement of Earth's circumference

The measurement of Earth's circumference is the most famous among the results obtained by Eratosthenes, who estimated that the meridian has a length of 252,000 stadia (39060 to 40320 km), with an error on the real value between −2.4% and +0.8% (assuming a value for the stadion between 155 and 160 m). Eratosthenes described his arc measurement technique, in a book entitled , which has not been preserved. However, a simplified version of the method has been preserved, as described by Cleomedes.

The simplified method works by considering two cities along the same meridian and measuring both the distance between them and the difference in angles of the shadows cast by the sun on a vertical rod (a gnomon) in each city at noon on the summer solstice. The two cities used were Alexandria and Syene (modern Aswan), and the distance between the cities was measured by professional bematists. A geometric calculation reveals that the circumference of the Earth is the distance between the two cities divided by the difference in shadow angles expressed as a fraction of one turn.

Geography

Eratosthenes now continued from his knowledge about the Earth. Using his discoveries and knowledge of its size and shape, he began to sketch it. In the Library of Alexandria he had access to various travel books, which contained various items of information and representations of the world that needed to be pieced together in some organized format. In his three-volume work Geography (Geographika), he described and mapped his entire known world, even dividing the Earth into five climate zones: two freezing zones around the poles, two temperate zones, and a zone encompassing the equator and the tropics. This book is the first recorded instance of many terms still in use today, including the name of the discipline geography. He placed grids of overlapping lines over the surface of the Earth. He used parallels and meridians to link together every place in the world. It was now possible to estimate one's distance from remote locations with this network over the surface of the Earth. In the Geography the names of over 400 cities and their locations were shown, which had never been achieved before. However, his Geography has been lost to history, although fragments of the work can be pieced together from other great historians like Pliny, Polybius, Strabo, and Marcianus. While this work is the earliest we can trace certain ideas, words, and concepts in the historical record, earlier contributions may have been lost to history.
 * The first book was something of an introduction and gave a review of his predecessors, recognizing their contributions that he compiled in the library. In this book Eratosthenes denounced Homer as not providing any insight into what he now described as geography. His disapproval of Homer's topography angered many who believed the world depicted in the Odyssey to be legitimate. He also commented on the ideas of the nature and origin of the Earth: he thought of Earth as an immovable globe while its surface was changing. He hypothesized that at one time the Mediterranean had been a vast lake that covered the countries that surrounded it and that it only became connected to the ocean to the west when a passage opened up sometime in its history.
 * The second book contains his calculation of the circumference of the Earth. This is where, according to Pliny, "The world was grasped." Here Eratosthenes described his famous story of the well in Syene, wherein at noon each summer solstice, the Sun's rays shone straight down into the city-center well. This book would now be considered a text on mathematical geography.
 * His third book of the Geography contained political geography. He cited countries and used parallel lines to divide the map into sections, to give accurate descriptions of the realms. This was a breakthrough and can be considered the beginning of geography. For this, Eratosthenes was named the "Father of Modern Geography."

According to Strabo, Eratosthenes argued against the Greek-Barbarian dichotomy. He says Alexander ignored his advisers by his regard for all people with law and government. Strabo says that Eratosthenes was wrong to claim that Alexander had disregarded the counsel of his advisers. Strabo argues it was Alexander's interpretation of their "real intent" in recognizing that "in some people there prevail the law-abiding and the political instinct, and the qualities associated with education and powers of speech".

Achievements
Eratosthenes was described by the Suda Lexicon as a Πένταθλος (Pentathlos) which can be translated as "All-Rounder", for he was skilled in a variety of things: He was a true polymath. He was nicknamed "Number 2" because he was great at many things and tried to get his hands on every bit of information but never achieved the highest rank in anything; Strabo accounts Eratosthenes as a mathematician among geographers and a geographer among mathematicians.
 * Eusebius of Caesarea in his Preparatio Evangelica includes a brief chapter of three sentences on celestial distances (Book XV, Chapter 53). He states simply that Eratosthenes found the distance to the Sun to be "σταδίων μυριάδας τετρακοσίας καὶ ὀκτωκισμυρίας" (literally "of stadia myriads 400 and 80,000") and the distance to the Moon to be 780,000 stadia. The expression for the distance to the Sun has been translated either as 4,080,000 stadia (1903 translation by E. H. Gifford), or as 804,000,000 stadia (edition of Edouard des Places, dated 1974–1991). The meaning depends on whether Eusebius meant 400 myriad plus 80,000 or "400 and 80,000" myriad. With a stade of 185 m, 804,000,000 stadia is 149000000 km, approximately the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
 * Eratosthenes also calculated the Sun's diameter. According to Macrobius, Eratosthenes made the diameter of the Sun to be about 27 times that of the Earth. The actual figure is approximately 109 times.
 * During his time at the Library of Alexandria, Eratosthenes devised a calendar using his predictions about the ecliptic of the Earth. He calculated that there are 365 days in a year and that every fourth year there would be 366 days.
 * He was also very proud of his solution for Doubling the Cube. His motivation was that he wanted to produce catapults. Eratosthenes constructed a mechanical line drawing device to calculate the cube, called the mesolabio. He dedicated his solution to King Ptolemy, presenting a model in bronze with it a letter and an epigram. Archimedes was Eratosthenes' friend and he, too, worked on the war instrument with mathematics. Archimedes dedicated his book The Method to Eratosthenes, knowing his love for learning and mathematics.

Number theory

Eratosthenes proposed a simple algorithm for finding prime numbers. This algorithm is known in mathematics as the Sieve of Eratosthenes.

In mathematics, the sieve of Eratosthenes (Greek: κόσκινον Ἐρατοσθένους), one of a number of prime number sieves, is a simple, ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit. It does so by iteratively marking as composite, i.e., not prime, the multiples of each prime, starting with the multiples of 2. The multiples of a given prime are generated starting from that prime, as a sequence of numbers with the same difference, equal to that prime, between consecutive numbers. This is the sieve's key distinction from using trial division to sequentially test each candidate number for divisibility by each prime.

Works
Eratosthenes was one of the most pre-eminent scholarly figures of his time, and produced works covering a vast area of knowledge before and during his time at the Library. He wrote on many topics – geography, mathematics, philosophy, chronology, literary criticism, grammar, poetry, and even old comedies. There are no documents left of his work after the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

Titles

 * Platonikos (lost, quoted by Theon of Smyrna)
 * Hermes
 * Erigone
 * Chronographies
 * Olympic Victors
 * Περὶ τῆς ἀναμετρήσεως τῆς γῆς (On the Measurement of the Earth) (lost, summarized by Cleomedes)
 * Гεωγραϕικά (Geographika) (lost, criticized by Strabo)
 * Arsinoe (a memoir of queen Arsinoe; lost; quoted by Athenaeus in the Deipnosophistae)
 * Ariston (concerning Aristo of Chios' addiction to luxury; lost; quoted by Athenaeus in the Deipnosophistae)
 * The Catasterismi (Katasterismoi), a lost collection of Hellenistic myths about the constellations

title: Eratosthenes


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Iona Nikitchenko

Major-General Iona Timofeevich Nikitchenko (Russian: Иона Тимофеевич Никитченко; 28 June 1895 – 22 April 1967) was a Russian judge who served on the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union. He later served on the International Military Tribunal during the Nuremberg trials as a judge for the Soviet Union.

Early life and career
Iona was born to a peasant family in khutor Tuzlukov (now Rostov Oblast). He studied at his local Agricultural Institute and from 1916 was a Bolshevik. His court experience started in May 1920 when he was appointed as the chairman-deputy of the Military Court of Semirechye Army Group during the Civil War. During the Russian Civil War, he participated on the frontlines in Central Asia. In 1924, he was appointed as the member of the Military Court Collegiate of the Moscow Military District.

As deputy chairman of Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, Nikitchenko presided over some of the most notorious of Joseph Stalin's show trials during the Great Purges from 1936 to 1938 and notably sentenced Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev.

Nuremberg trials
Nikitchenko was one of the three main drafters of the London Charter. He was also the Soviet Union's judge at the Nuremberg trials and was president for the session at Berlin. Nikitchenko's prejudices were evident from the outset. Before the Tribunal had convened, Nikitchenko explained the Soviet perspective of the trials:"'We are dealing here with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted and whose conviction has been already announced by both the Moscow and Crimea [Yalta] declarations by the heads of the [Allied] governments.... The whole idea is to secure quick and just punishment for the crime.'" Nikitchenko dissented against the acquittals of Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen and Hans Fritzsche; he also argued for a death sentence for Rudolf Hess, who was ultimately sentenced to life in prison by the tribunal. Nikitchenko said, in the lead-up to the trials, "If... the judge is supposed to be impartial, it would only lead to unnecessary delays." Nikitchenko also found the majority judgments incorrect with regard to the Reich Cabinet, the German General Staff and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. Having never before written a dissenting opinion—these being unheard of in Soviet jurisprudence—and being unsure of the form of such an opinion, Nikitchenko was assisted in writing his dissents by his fellow judge Norman Birkett.

Nikitchenko feared a compromise on too lenient a level. At the point of final deliberation he reexamined Hess' case and voted for a life sentence so that the opportunity for Hess to get away with a lesser degree of punishment did not occur.

Later career
In March 1946, Nikitchenko was re-elected to the Supreme Court of the USSR, and until July 1949 he worked as deputy chairman of this body. From August 1949 to September 1951, head of the department of linear water transport vessels of the Ministry of Justice. He retired in 1951.

Iona Nikitchenko died in 1967 and was buried at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

title: Iona Nikitchenko


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Range coding

Range coding (or range encoding) is an entropy coding method defined by G. Nigel N. Martin in a 1979 paper, which effectively rediscovered the FIFO arithmetic code first introduced by Richard Clark Pasco in 1976. Given a stream of symbols and their probabilities, a range coder produces a space-efficient stream of bits to represent these symbols and, given the stream and the probabilities, a range decoder reverses the process.

Range coding is very similar to arithmetic coding, except that coding is done with digits in any base, instead of with bits, and so it is faster when using larger bases (e.g. a byte) at small cost in compression efficiency. After the expiration of the first (1978) arithmetic coding patent, range coding appeared to clearly be free of patent encumbrances. This particularly drove interest in the technique in the open source community. Since that time, patents on various well-known arithmetic coding techniques have also expired.

How range coding works
Range coding conceptually encodes all the symbols of the message into one number, unlike Huffman coding which assigns each symbol a bit-pattern and concatenates all the bit-patterns together. Thus range coding can achieve greater compression ratios than the one-bit-per-symbol lower bound on Huffman coding and it does not suffer the inefficiencies that Huffman does when dealing with probabilities that are not an exact power of two.

The central concept behind range coding is this: given a large-enough range of integers, and a probability estimation for the symbols, the initial range can easily be divided into sub-ranges whose sizes are proportional to the probability of the symbol they represent. Each symbol of the message can then be encoded in turn, by reducing the current range down to just that sub-range which corresponds to the next symbol to be encoded. The decoder must have the same probability estimation the encoder used, which can either be sent in advance, derived from already transferred data or be part of the compressor and decompressor.

When all symbols have been encoded, merely identifying the sub-range is enough to communicate the entire message (presuming of course that the decoder is somehow notified when it has extracted the entire message). A single integer is actually sufficient to identify the sub-range, and it may not even be necessary to transmit the entire integer; if there is a sequence of digits such that every integer beginning with that prefix falls within the sub-range, then the prefix alone is all that's needed to identify the sub-range and thus transmit the message.

Example
Suppose we want to encode the message "AABA", where  is the end-of-message symbol. For this example it is assumed that the decoder knows that we intend to encode exactly five symbols in the base 10 number system (allowing for 105 different combinations of symbols with the range [0, 100000) ) using the probability distribution {A: .60; B: .20; : .20}. The encoder breaks down the range [0, 100000) into three subranges:

A:    [     0,  60000)  B:     [ 60000,  80000) : [ 80000, 100000)

Since our first symbol is an A, it reduces our initial range down to [0, 60000) . The second symbol choice leaves us with three sub-ranges of this range. We show them following the already-encoded 'A':

AA:    [     0,  36000)  AB:     [ 36000,  48000) A: [ 48000, 60000)

With two symbols encoded, our range is now [0, 36000) and our third symbol leads to the following choices:

AAA:    [     0,  21600)  AAB:     [ 21600,  28800) AA: [ 28800, 36000)

This time it is the second of our three choices that represent the message we want to encode, and our range becomes [21600, 28800) . It may look harder to determine our sub-ranges in this case, but it is actually not: we can merely subtract the lower bound from the upper bound to determine that there are 7200 numbers in our range; that the first 4320 of them represent 0.60 of the total, the next 1440 represent the next 0.20, and the remaining 1440 represent the remaining 0.20 of the total. Adding back the lower bound gives us our ranges:

AABA:    [21600, 25920)  AABB:     [25920, 27360) AAB: [27360, 28800)

Finally, with our range narrowed down to [21600, 25920), we have just one more symbol to encode. Using the same technique as before for dividing up the range between the lower and upper bound, we find the three sub-ranges are:

AABAA:    [21600, 24192)  AABAB:     [24192, 25056) AABA: [25056, 25920)

And since  is our final symbol, our final range is [25056, 25920) . Because all five-digit integers starting with "251" fall within our final range, it is one of the three-digit prefixes we could transmit that would unambiguously convey our original message. (The fact that there are actually eight such prefixes in all implies we still have inefficiencies. They have been introduced by our use of base 10 rather than base 2.)

The central problem may appear to be selecting an initial range large enough that no matter how many symbols we have to encode, we will always have a current range large enough to divide into non-zero sub-ranges. In practice, however, this is not a problem, because instead of starting with a very large range and gradually narrowing it down, the encoder works with a smaller range of numbers at any given time. After some number of digits have been encoded, the leftmost digits will not change. In the example after coding just three symbols, we already knew that our final result would start with "2". More digits are shifted in on the right as digits on the left are sent off. This is illustrated in the following code:

To finish off we may need to emit a few extra digits. The top digit of  is probably too small so we need to increment it, but we have to make sure we don't increment it past. So first we need to make sure  is large enough.

One problem that can occur with the  function above is that   might become very small but   and   still have differing first digits. This could result in the interval having insufficient precision to distinguish between all of the symbols in the alphabet. When this happens we need to fudge a little, output the first couple of digits even though we might be off by one, and re-adjust the range to give us as much room as possible.

For example, imagine the input stream has led the encoder to the right-open interval [59888, 60188), that is,  and  . The trick is to narrow down the interval to [59888, 60000) = [59888, 59999], which allows the encoder to emit two of the left-most digits of , and re-ajust the interval to [88800, 99999] = [88800, 100000), that is,   and.

The decoder will be following the same steps so it will know when it needs to do this to keep in sync.

Base 10 was used in this example, but a real implementation would just use binary, with the full range of the native integer data type. Instead of  and   you would likely use hexadecimal constants such as   and. Instead of emitting a digit at a time you would emit a byte at a time and use a byte-shift operation instead of multiplying by 10.

Decoding uses exactly the same algorithm with the addition of keeping track of the current  value consisting of the digits read from the compressor. Instead of emitting the top digit of  you just throw it away, but you also shift out the top digit of   and shift in a new digit read from the compressor. Use  below instead of.

In order to determine which probability intervals to apply, the decoder needs to look at the current value of  within the interval [low, low+range) and decide which symbol this represents.

For the AABA example above, this would return a value in the range 0 to 9. Values 0 through 5 would represent A, 6 and 7 would represent B, and 8 and 9 would represent .

Relationship with arithmetic coding
Arithmetic coding is the same as range coding, but with the integers taken as being the numerators of fractions. These fractions have an implicit, common denominator, such that all the fractions fall in the range [0,1) . Accordingly, the resulting arithmetic code is interpreted as beginning with an implicit "0". As these are just different interpretations of the same coding methods, and as the resulting arithmetic and range codes are identical, each arithmetic coder is its corresponding range encoder, and vice versa. In other words, arithmetic coding and range coding are just two, slightly different ways of understanding the same thing.

In practice, though, so-called range encoders tend to be implemented pretty much as described in Martin's paper, while arithmetic coders more generally tend not to be called range encoders. An often noted feature of such range encoders is the tendency to perform renormalization a byte at a time, rather than one bit at a time (as is usually the case). In other words, range encoders tend to use bytes as coding digits, rather than bits. While this does reduce the amount of compression that can be achieved by a very small amount, it is faster than when performing renormalization for each bit.

title: Range coding