Historians of medieval England have devoted little sustained attention to the law of usury, and what attention they have paid to the subject has not been focused on the law's enforcement in court practice. A common assumption has been that one could not go much beyond academic treatises and legislative enactments in studying the subject. This has left an undeniable gap, one which English historians have not made as much progress in filling as have Continental historians. In dealing with enforcement (...) of the law of usury in medieval England, therefore, most general treatments have had either to make reasonable guesses from secondary evidence or to be silent. (shrink)

The existence of consciousness in animals may have been overlooked. Continuity in consciousness between humans and animals is predicted by evolutionary theory. However, there are specific methodological difficulties associated with investigating such a phenomenon: it cannot be directly measured; animals, unlike humans, cannot directly tell us about their conscious experience; experiments which have made comparisons to human consciousness cannot detect consciousness of a different form; application of the law of parsimony in science has traditionally led to the conclusion that it (...) does not exist. (shrink)

On April 26, 1995, the United States Supreme Court limited the reach of the preemption provision of ERISA in New York State Conference of Blue Cross & Blue Shield Plans v. Tavelers Insurance Co. ). In Travelers, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of a New York statute requiring hospitals to collect surcharges from patients covered by commercial insurers and requiring health maintenance organizations to pay a surcharge to the state's general fund that varies depending on the number of Medicaid-eligible (...) HMO members enrolled. Neither patients insured by Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans nor the plans themselves are similarly charged under the statute. Several commercial insurers and HMOs claimed the surcharges should be preempted under ERISA because they are levied on patients whose insurance or HMO membership premiums are purchased by an ERISA plan.The ERISA preemption clause means that federal regulation, or lack thereof, supersedes state regulation that is related to employee pension and benefit plans. This preemption clause prevents states from changing health care and benefit law for a significant portion of state residents. (shrink)

Las organizaciones sin fines de lucro han sufrido grandes cambios. Dejó de ser un sector empobrecido, donde se recibían como donaciones aquel dinero que les sobraba a los grandes empresarios, y donde sólo tenían cabida las personas voluntarias. Hoy en día es un sector marcado por el trabajo de personas profesionales y por ser organizaciones capaces de llenar los espacios que ha dejado el Estado sin atender. Además de ser organizaciones inteligentes, con estructuras flexibles, que les permiten responder de manera (...) ágil a los requerimientos de su entorno. Sin embargo para que el sector sin fines de lucro pueda evolucionar de manera exitosa, no sólo necesitan de la labor de sus miembros, también necesitan del compromiso del estado, las universidades y las entidades privadas. Un compromiso que se haga visible a través de alianzas de colaboración entre sí, y así de esta manera trabajar conjuntamente en el desarrollo humano y la inclusión social en Chile. (shrink)

Raciolinguistics reveals the central role that language plays in shaping our ideas about race and vice versa. The book brings together a team of leading scholars-working both within and beyond the United States-to share powerful, much-needed research that helps us understand the increasingly vexed relationships between race, ethnicity, and language in our rapidly changing world. Combining the innovative, cutting-edge approaches of race and ethnic studies with fine-grained linguistic analyses, authors cover a wide range of topics including the struggle over the (...) very term "African American," the racialized language education debates within the increasing number of "majority-minority" immigrant communities in the U.S., the dangers of multicultural education in a Europe that is struggling to meet the needs of new migrants, and the sociopolitical and cultural meanings of linguistic styles used in Brazilian favelas, South African townships, Mexican and Puerto Rican barrios in Chicago, and Korean American "cram schools" in New York City, among other sites. Taking into account rapidly changing demographics in the U.S and shifting cultural and media trends across the globe--from Hip Hop cultures, to transnational Mexican popular and street cultures, to Israeli reality TV, to new immigration trends across Africa and Europe--Raciolinguistics shapes the future of scholarship on race, ethnicity, and language. By taking a comparative look across a diverse range of language and literacy contexts, the volume seeks not only to set the research agenda in this burgeoning area of study, but also to help resolve pressing educational and political problems in some of the most contested raciolinguistic contexts in the world. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * The gaze drifts where the stare dares not. The gaze is attentive while the stare is intent. Dériver : Equally to drift and/or to derive. —When drifting then, something must be taken along. Something must be derived from the drift. Something of oneself must always become other. Incorporating the other, incorporating oneself as other. Je est un autre , Rimbaud disait; 1 this in his last letter to Georges Izambard, a final correspondence to a former mentor and friend, from whom he was drifting away, having derived much. The drift is a control incomplete. To drift is to come closer and closer, but to always be turning away, pulling apart, pulling oneself apart. It is parabolic in the sense that it is always eluding a formerly established intent. Of all axes, it never finds room to rest. Filling new spaces, always changing places, ever escaping the Cartesian; the indubitable pinpointing of position. It is never pinned down. Love together what we will be apart. Once together, we will drift apart. Il le faut . Attention is held; it traces the path. It follows each point which traces the arc, the line, the swerve. It is not concerned with the figure being drawn, but rather the movement between one point and the next. The smallest movement. The clinamen of De Rerum Natura is the smallest of swerves, it is nothing more than the minimum — nec plus quam minimum . Michel Serres says of the clinamen , that it is an absurdity — a logical, geometrical, mechanical, physical absurdity. 'The clinamen, from here (its state of absurdity), finds refuge in subjectivity; it passes from the world to the soul, from the physical to the metaphysical, from the theory of inert bodies in freefall to the theory of the free movements of the living.' 2 So this swerve is something of the mind and something of the body, both in action, rather than a body which is merely acted upon. Swerve, however, has a connotation of suddenness. It is a movement which is made to avoid an otherwise inevitable impact. Drift, on the other hand, is the unleashing of something which is then allowed to follow a more complex series of forces. These forces now come from within as well as without. It is no longer tethered; now following tides, winds, flows or pitched slopes, now acting on its own. We are not atoms in freefall. Our attention long ago pulled us from this precipitous descent. We now live, ourselves, as one of the many forces. In the drift, as with the gaze, there is an ease. ‘Ease is the proper name of this unrepresentable space.’ It is the space nearest, the next, the neighboring space. To occupy this space requires a turn, a shift or a drift. It cannot be reached by proceeding straight ahead. ‘..the space adjacent, the empty place where each can move freely, in a semantic constellation where spatial proximity borders on opportune time (ad-agio, moving at ease) and convenience borders on the correct relation.’ 3 Intention always seeks to straighten this line, to make it less complex, to isolate the point of departure and the desired destination. It believes there can be two points and, between them, there must be a straight line. Can there be? Maybe. Must there be? Never. Straight lines may exist, but they can never be followed to the finish. After leaving this point, we will never reach that one without being buffeted at least a little — at least the least. One foot in front of the other, this is a very restrictive dance, less even than a two-step. Straight lines lead only to lost intentions, being the shortest and quickest way to get there. When attention drifts it slowly turns away from the intended target, leaving it for something which pulls the attention away. Now we are for a moment free; all at once we can pivot, now we can waltz. Drifting along the page, deriving from what is seen. Reading is seeing; the movement of the eyes as they drift. Reading in the eyes what has been seen, what has been derived from the act of reading. Reading eyes drift back and forth down the page, now and then jump back and forth, up to the top, one word, back down, quickly a few pages back, now gaze out towards the horizon. When attention drifts it is the gaze that follows. Our attention is not restricted to the path the words follow, but links them together; deriving what is to be seen, rather than read. La philosophie fait voir . ‘Thus, philosophers speak through proverbs, and demonstrate. They connect their imaginations with foreign rings, flown into famous tombs.’ 4 Now drifting off to sleep, dreams come as unintended visions. To dream is pure drift, vision without an object, gazing into the dark, reading the unknown of the night. NOTES: Arthur Rimbaud, Poésies (Paris: Bibliothéque de Cluny, 1958), 57. Michel Serres, La Naissance de la Physique (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977), 10. Translation courtesy of R.H. Jackson. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), 25. Louis Aragon, Une Vague des Rêves (Paris: Editions Seghers, 2006), 10. Translation courtesy of R.H. Jackson.  . (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Social Autopoiesis?” by Hugo Urrestarazu. Upshot: In my commentary I reflect on conceptual and epistemological questions. In particular, I challenge the idea of trying to define social systems. I also wonder whether in many cases autopoiesis is carelessly used as a mere synonym for self-organization.

The Random Number Generation task has a long history in neuropsychology as an assessment procedure for executive functioning. In recent years, understanding of human behavior has gradually changed from reflecting a static to a dynamic process and this shift in thinking about behavior gives a new angle to interpret test results. However, this shift also asks for different methods to process random number sequences. The RNG task is suited for applying non-linear methods needed to uncover the underlying dynamics of random (...) number generation. In the current article we present RandseqR: an R-package that combines the calculation of classic randomization measures and Recurrence Quantification Analysis. RandseqR is an easy to use, flexible and fast way to process random number sequences and readies the RNG task for current scientific and clinical use. (shrink)