Castle Valley America: Hard Land, Hard-Won Home

Hard Won and Easily Lost

This article reviews evidence that manhood is seen as a precarious social status that is both difficult to achieve and tenuously held. Compared with womanhood, which is typically viewed as resulting from a natural, permanent, and biological developmental transition, manhood must be earned and maintained through publicly verifiable actions. Because of this, men experience more anxiety over their...

Climate science, character, and the "hard-won" consensus.

What makes a consensus among scientists credible and convincing? This paper introduces the notion of a "hard-won" consensus and uses examples from recent debates over climate change science to show that this heuristic standard for evaluating the quality of a consensus is widely shared. The extent to which a consensus is "hard won" can be understood to depend on the personal qualities of the par...

The 'axe man' departs, offering hard-won lessons.

Optimization Tradecraft: Hard-Won Insights from Real-World Decision Support

Practitioners of optimization-based decision support advise commerce and government on how to coordinate the activities of millions of people who employ assets worth trillions of dollars. The contributions of these practitioners substantially improve planning methods that benefit our security and welfare. The success of realworld optimization applications depends on a few trade secrets that are...

Eradicating Invasive Plants: Hard-won Lessons for Islands

The record of eradicating invasive plants, whether on islands or continents, consists of few clear victories, some stalemates, and many defeats. Instructive, if hard-won, lessons have nevertheless been learned. (1) The ideal eradication campaign would see all individuals of a potentially-invasive species destroyed immediately upon their arrival. Few immigrants meet this fate; more usually there...