In this paper I discuss the four Women and Labour conferences which were held in Australian capital cities over the seven years between 1978 and 1984. I explore the ways in which the history of Australian feminist activism during this period could be written, questioning in particular the claim that the Women and Labour conferences have been central to the history of Australian feminism. I discuss the ways in which a historical sense could be established, using writings about the conferences (...) as historical ‘evidence’, that race and ethnic divisions between women had not been important to the ‘women's movement’ until 1984. In other words, I challenge the construction of this conference as a turning point – not only in the feminist politicization of immigrant and Aboriginal women, but also in the politicization of all feminists about race and ethnic divisions. More broadly, I am interested in how a history would be written if it aimed to get to the ‘truth’ about racism and about the feminist activism of immigrant women. How would the apparent lack of written ‘evidence’ – at least until 1984 – of immigrant women's feminist activism, and of the awareness of Australian feminists about issues of racism, be written into this history? In addition, I suggest that it is important to the writing of feminist history in Australia that published documentation has been mostly produced by anglo women, and is thus partial and mediated by the lived, embodied experiences of anglo women. Finally, my intention is to interrogate commonly understood narratives about Australian feminist history, to challenge their seamlessness, and to suggest the importance of recognizing the tension within feminist discourses between difference as benign diversity and difference as disruption. (shrink)

Cognitive science is, more than anything else, a pursuit of cognitive mechanisms. To make headway towards a mechanistic account of any particular cognitive phenomenon, a researcher must choose among the many architectures available to guide and constrain the account. It is thus fitting that this volume on contemporary debates in cognitive science includes two issues of architecture, each articulated in the 1980s but still unresolved: " • Just how modular is the mind? – a debate initially pitting encapsulated mechanisms against (...) highly interactive ones. • Does the mind process language-like representations according to formal rules? – a debate initially pitting symbolic architectures against less language-like architectures. " Our project here is to consider the second issue within the broader context of where cognitive science has been and where it is headed. The notion that cognition in general—not just language processing—involves rules operating on language-like representations actually predates cognitive science. In traditional philosophy of mind, mental life is construed as involving propositional attitudes—that is, such attitudes towards propositions as believing, fearing, and desiring that they be true—and logical inferences from them. On this view, if a person desires that a proposition be true and believes that if she performs a certain action it will become true, she will make the inference and perform the action. (shrink)

The present paper argues that there is ample corpus evidence of statistical preemption for learners to make use of. In the case of argument structure constructions, a verbi is preempted from appearing in a construction A, CxA, if and only if the following probability is high: P(CxB|context that would be suitable for CxA and verbi). For example, the probability of hearing a preemptive construction, given a context that would otherwise be well-suited for the ditransitive is high for verbs like explain (...) that overwhelmingly appear in the dative, and low for verbs like tell that readily appear in the ditransitive. Strength of statistical preemption is determined both by this probability, and by the frequency (ln (F)) of a verb in a preemptive construction when the context is at least as well suited to the preempted construction. The critiques of preemption by Stefanowitsch (Cognitive Linguistics 19: 513–531, 2008, this volume) are countered by arguing that the relevant probabilities were not considered. Moreover, we find evidence that constructions are somewhat less constrained when yoked to non-alternating verbs, as Stefanowitsch (cf. this volume) suggests should be the case. (shrink)

In two experiments, participants had to choose between a sure and a risky option. The sure option was presented either in a gain or a loss frame. Need was defined as a minimum score the participants had to reach. Moreover, choices were made under two different time constraints and with three different levels of induced need to be reached within a fixed number of trials. The two experiments differed with respect to the specific amounts to win and the need levels. (...) The $$2 \times 2 \times 3$$2×2×3 design was a within-subject design. Data were evaluated on an overall and on a group level, the latter based on participants’ stated risk preference and on revealed preferences using cluster analysis across subjects. Overall, the results showed riskier behavior when the choice options were presented as losses as compared to gains and when the induced need was highest. Time limits enhanced the framing effect. (shrink)

A new theoretical approach to language has emerged in the past 10–15 years that allows linguistic observations about form–meaning pairings, known as ‘construc- tions’, to be stated directly. Constructionist approaches aim to account for the full range of facts about language, without assuming that a particular subset of the data is part of a privileged ‘core’. Researchers in this field argue that unusual constructions shed light on more general issues, and can illuminate what is required for a complete account of (...) language. (shrink)

The Eurotransplant Kidney Allocation System (ETKAS) emerged from the XCOMB model by Wujciak and Opelz (1993a,b), who applied computer simulation studies to create an allocation algorithm. The present study investigated how experts would allocate a donated organ to patients on the waiting list with respect to the five allocation factors proposed in the ETKAS (number of mismatches, mismatch probability, waiting time, distance, international exchange balance). The experts’ evaluations were compared to the ETKAS points as well as to factor weights established (...) in mandatory allocation guidelines which are based on the German law for organ allocation (Transplantationsgesetz). The investigation was carried out using a conjoint analysis. Overall, the results indicate a fairly high degree of agreement between the experts’ opinions and the existing allocation system ETKAS and even more so for the allocation guidelines, in particular, with respect to the factors Mismatches, Mismatch probability, and Waiting time. (shrink)

This study aimed to explore the understanding of and attitudes towards academic ethics of first-year students at a South African University using a paper-based survey that yielded 3611 respondents. A degree of confusion and ambivalence regarding academic ethical issues exists. The relative wealth of respondents also appears to influence the understanding of and attitudes to academic ethics. Millennial students have a tendency to disregard ownership of knowledge. There is a need for instruction in academic ethics to instil an awareness of (...) integrity in academic pursuit, coupled with an understanding of the world views of millennials. (shrink)

Pushing through a logical continuum of closed-to open-system views of organizations necessarily changes the conceptualization of a firm from a strongly bounded entity to a configuration of networks and sub-networks, which exists and operates in a larger systemic network configuration. We unfold a classification of management processes corresponding to views of the firm along the closed/open-systems continuum. We examine ethical issues that are likely to devolve from these classes of management processes, and we suggest typical means by which managers will (...) attempt to control their firms' exposure to such issues. The final class of management processes examined focuses on the achievement of out-comes that are mutually satisfactory in the set of networks and sub-networks that constitute the focal firm, and that support the sustainability of the whole system. The article contributes to organizational theory, business ethics, and computer and information ethics by providing a comprehensive analysis of the impact of managerial views of the firm and of networks - virtual, social, informational - on managerial processes and on our understanding of how business ethics issues are linked to perceptions of what a firm is, does, and can do. (shrink)

Wikipedia is known as a free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia uses largely transparent writing and editing processes, which aim at providing the user with quality information through a democratic collaborative system. However, one aspect of these processes is not transparent—the identity of contributors, editors, and administrators. We argue that this particular lack of transparency jeopardizes the validity of the information being produced by Wikipedia. We analyze the social and ethical consequences of this lack of transparency in Wikipedia for all users, but (...) especially students; we assess the corporate social performance issues involved, and we propose courses of action to compensate for the potential problems. We show that Wikipedia has the appearance, but not the reality, of responsible, transparent information production. (shrink)

Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity is a landmark contribution that provides fresh insights into the experience and process of mourning. It includes fourteen original essays by pre-eminent psychoanalysts, historians, classicists, theologians, architects, art-historians and artists, that take on the subject of normal, rather than pathological mourning. In particular, it considers the diversity of the mourning process; the bereavement of ordinary vs. extraordinary loss; the contribution of mourning to personal and creative growth; and individual, social, and cultural means of (...) transcending grief. The book is divided into three parts, each including two to four essays followed by one or two critical discussions. Co-editor _Adele Tutter’s_ Prologue outlines the salient themes and tensions that emerge from the volume. Part I juxtaposes the consideration of grief in antiquity with an examination of the contemporary use of memorials to facilitate communal remembrance. Part II offers intimate first-person accounts of mourning from four renowned psychoanalysts that challenge long-held psychoanalytic formulations of mourning. Part III contains deeply personal essays that explore the use of sculpture, photography, and music to withstand, mourn, and transcend loss on individual, cultural and political levels. Drawing on the humanistic wisdom that underlies psychoanalytic thought, co-editor _Léon Wurmser’s_ Epilogue closes the volume. Grief and its Transcendence will be a must for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and scholars within other disciplines who are interested in the topics of grief, bereavement and creativity. (shrink)

This paper focuses attention on the stakeholder attribute of legitimacy. Drawing upon institutional and stakeholder theories, I develop a framework of stakeholder legitimacy based on its three aspects—legitimacy of the stakeholder as an entity, legitimacy of the stakeholder’s claim, and legitimacy of the stakeholder’s behavior. I assume that stakeholder legitimacy is socially constructed by management and that each of its three aspects exists in degree in the manager’s perception. I discuss how these aspects interact and change over time, and propose (...) an agenda for future research on stakeholder legitimacy. (shrink)

The study aims to identify the adequacy of the UAE Commercial Law in 2023 in regulating artificial intelligence as a subject of the contract, This will be done by searching for the way in which the UAE legislator intervened to control the good and effective use of artificial intelligence, whether it was able to reconcile between protecting the interests of the parties to the transaction and encouraging technological development and investment in artificial intelligence to achieve the goals of the National (...) Strategy for Artificial Intelligence. Then, the cases of using artificial intelligence as a subject for commercial transactions will be highlighted, because artificial intelligence is considered one of the funds and products that can be the subject of commercial transactions between professional traders, which remain subject to the applicable legislation, even those that link the trader to the consumer due to the availability of the elements of the consumer process in this type of transaction, which is concerned with protecting the consumer because the consumer transaction must be carried out with transparency and responsibility. However, as a result of the privacy of such transactions, the current legislation does not appear sufficient, but rather work must be done to establish legislative provisions to control dealings in artificial intelligence at the local and international levels to govern artificial intelligence. (shrink)

I present several arguments which provide what I consider to be a definitive argument against certain forms of masculine language in their so-called sexually neutral usage. In the first part, I concentrate on the use of the word and I defend the idea that it embodies a perverse contingent a priori. In the second part, I examine how this pernicious a prioriinfects the pronominal system of French. I conclude with an undoubtedly surprising linguistic and feminist criticism of a recent decision (...) by the Office de la langue franbec to feminize job titles, arguing instead that the problem lies elsewhere and hence so does an efficient solution. (shrink)

We investigate the order in which speakers produce the proper names of couples they know personally in English and Japanese, two languages with markedly different constituent word orders. Results demonstrate that speakers of both languages tend to produce the name of the person they feel closer to before the name of the other member of the couple (N = 180). In this way, speakers’ unique personal histories give rise to a remarkably systematic linguistic generalization in both English and Japanese. Insofar (...) as closeness serves as an index of cognitive accessibility, the current work demonstrates that systematicity emerges from a domain-general property of memory. (shrink)

There are times when a curiously odd relic of language presents us with a thread, which when pulled, reveals deep and general facts about human language. This paper unspools such a case. Prior to 1930, English speakers uniformly preferred male-before-female word order in conjoined nouns such asuncles and aunts; nephews and nieces; men and women. Since then, at least a half dozen items have systematically reversed their preferred order (e.g.,aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews) while others have not (men and (...) women). We review evidence that the unusual reversals began withmother and dad(dy)and spread to semantically and morphologically related binomials over a period of decades. The present work proposes that three aspects ofcognitive accessibilitycombine to quantify the probability of A&B order: (1) the relative accessibility of the A&B terms individually, (2) competition from B&A order, and critically, (3) cluster strength (i.e., similarity to related A'&B' cases). The emergent cluster of female-first binomials highlights the influence of semantic neighborhoods in memory retrieval. We suggest that cognitive accessibility can be used to predict the word order of both familiar and novel binomials generally, as well as the diachronic change focused on here. (shrink)

Provides an account of how necessary subjective syntactic investments on the part of speakers affect the semantic contents of their words and the possibilities for their thought-contents.

We contend that diagrams are tools not only for communication but also for supporting the reasoning of biologists. In the mechanistic research that is characteristic of biology, diagrams delineate the phenomenon to be explained, display explanatory relations, and show the organized parts and operations of the mechanism proposed as responsible for the phenomenon. Both phenomenon diagrams and explanatory relations diagrams, employing graphs or other formats, facilitate applying visual processing to the detection of relevant patterns. Mechanism diagrams guide reasoning about how (...) the parts and operations work together to produce the phenomenon and what experiments need to be done to improve on the existing account. We examine how these functions are served by diagrams in circadian rhythm research. (shrink)

Explanations in the life sciences frequently involve presenting a model of the mechanism taken to be responsible for a given phenomenon. Such explanations depart in numerous ways from nomological explanations commonly presented in philosophy of science. This paper focuses on three sorts of differences. First, scientists who develop mechanistic explanations are not limited to linguistic representations and logical inference; they frequently employ diagrams to characterize mechanisms and simulations to reason about them. Thus, the epistemic resources for presenting mechanistic explanations are (...) considerably richer than those suggested by a nomological framework. Second, the fact that mechanisms involve organized systems of component parts and operations provides direction to both the discovery and testing of mechanistic explanations. Finally, models of mechanisms are developed for specific exemplars and are not represented in terms of universally quantified statements. Generalization involves investigating both the similarity of new exemplars to those already studied and the variations between them. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to formulate a sociological critique of the concept of scarcity in mainstream economics by synthesising necessary conceptions in the construction of a theoretical structure with greater explanatory power than the current mainstream articulation. Mainstream economics asserts the universality of scarcity. A critical scrutiny of this assertion is conducted by discussing the empirical phenomenon of global hunger in relation to a theoretical elaboration of the concepts of scarcity and abundance. The historical origins of the scarcity (...) postulate is traced to the work of Carl Menger. The concern of global hunger shows that there is abundance of food goods, but still frustration of human needs occurs. An alternative approach is developed through a theoretical synthesis of Menger, Amartya Sen and critical realism, which asserts an ontologically stratified, differentiated and geo-historically conditioned understanding of scarcity and abundance. It is proposed that this approach is more fruitful than the scarcity postulate in explaining the process and conditions of frustration and satisfaction of human needs. Merely postulating scarcity tends to veil the underlying causes of poverty in general and hunger in particular. Central implications of the new model for socioeconomic analysis are considered. (shrink)

The completion of the Human Genome Project has opened up unprecedented possibilities in healthcare, but also ethical and social dilemmas in terms of how these can be achieved. Genomic information can be seen as a "global public good" (GPG), in that it is represented by knowledge in the public domain and across national boundaries. Lack of investment, infrastructure and expertise in developing countries means that they are unable to take advantage of these GPG characteristics to address their health needs, fuelling (...) fears of a growing "genomics divide". Some have suggested an international knowledge sharing and capacity building network, a Global Genomics Initiative, as a means to harness the potential of genomics to reduce inequalities in health between North and South. Three UNESCO declarations also call for cooperation between developed and developing countries in genomics research and science and technology in general. Using international relations theories around global governance and networks as a conceptual framework, this paper examines whether these initiatives are likely to succeed in providing effective governance of genomics. (shrink)

Juris-Data is one of the largest case-study base in France. The case studies are indexed by legal classification elaborated by the Juris-Data Group. Knowledge engineering was used to design an intelligent interface for information retrieval based on this classification. The aim of the system is to help users find the case-study which is the most relevant to their own.The approach is potentially very useful, but for standardising it for other legal document bases it is necessary to extract a legal classification (...) of the primary documents. Thus, a methodology for the construction of these classifications was designed together with a framework for index construction. The project led to the implementation of a Legal Case Studies Engineering Framework based on the accumulated experimentation and the methodologies designed. It consists of a set of computerised tools which support the life-cycle of the legal document from their processing by legal experts to their consultation by clients. (shrink)

On a global platform we are witnessing the increased visibility of the people we call children and teenagers as political activists. Meanwhile, across the contemporary performance landscape, children are participating as performers and collaborators in ways that resonate with this figure of the child activist. Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance proposes that performance has the ability to offer alternatives to hegemonic perceptions of the child as innocent, in need of protection, and apolitical. Through an in-depth analysis of selected performances shown (...) in the UK within the past decade, alongside newly gathered documentation on children's participation in professional performance in their own words, this book considers how performance might offer more capacious representations of and encounters with children beyond the nostalgic and protective adult gaze elicited within mainstream contexts. Motivated by recent performative attempts to reimagine the figure of the child by working with children on stage, the book offers a new approach to both reading age in performance and also doing research with children rather than on or about them. By redressing the current imbalance between the way we read children and adults' bodies in performance and taking seriously children's cultures and experiences, Beyond Innocence asks what strategies contemporary performance has to offer both children and adults in order to foster shared spaces for social and political change. As such, the book develops an approach to analysing performance that not only recognises children as makers of meaning but also as historically, politically, and culturally situated subjects and bodies with lived experiences that far exceed the familiar narratives of innocence and inexperience that children often have to bear. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to approach the long literary tradition of catastrophic or apocalyptic narratives in relation to natural disasters and to explore examples of ecological threats to human species in contemporary Anglophone literature. By using the concept of ecophobia – a widespread irrational fear for nature – the author analyses novels by George R. Stewart ( Storm and Earth Abides ) and by Margaret Atwood ( Oryx and Crake ). Among the shared traits of these novels, the (...) author highlights the uncertain relationship with supernatural entities or divinities, the presence of surviving characters acting like last men of a disappearing human civilization, and the role of the humanities in the survival of the human species. (shrink)