Just In Time: defining historical chronographics

The paper is historical in two respects, both concerned with visual representations of past time. Its first purpose is to enquire how visual representations of historical time can be used to bring out patterns in a museum collection. A case study is presented of the visualisation of data with sufficient subtlety to be useful to historians and curators. Such a visual analytics approach raises questions about the proper representation of time and of objects and events within it. It is argued that such chronographics can support both an externalised, objectivising point of view from ‘outside’ time and one which is immersive and gives a sense of the historic moment. These modes are set in their own historical context through original historical research, highlighting the shift to an Enlightenment view of time as a uniform container for events. This in turn prompts new ways of thinking about chronological visualisation, in particular the separation of the ‘ideal’ image of time from contingent, temporary rendered views

Net neutrality discourses: comparing advocacy and regulatory arguments in the United States and the United Kingdom

Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this has been occurring in the United States around efforts to introduce "Net neutrality" regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has not developed in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe. We develop a comparative analysis of U.S. and UK Net neutrality debates with an eye toward identifying the arguments for and against regulation, how those arguments differ between the countries, and what the implications of those differences are for the Internet. Drawing on mass media, advocacy, and regulatory discourses, we find that local regulatory precedents as well as cultural factors contribute to both agenda setting and framing of Net neutrality. The differences between national discourses provide a way to understand both the structural differences between regulatory cultures and the substantive differences between policy interpretations, both of which must be reconciled for the Internet to continue to thrive as a global medium

Net neutrality discourses: comparing advocacy and regulatory arguments in the United States and the United Kingdom

Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this has been occurring in the United States around efforts to introduce "Net neutrality" regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has not developed in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe. We develop a comparative analysis of U.S. and UK Net neutrality debates with an eye toward identifying the arguments for and against regulation, how those arguments differ between the countries, and what the implications of those differences are for the Internet. Drawing on mass media, advocacy, and regulatory discourses, we find that local regulatory precedents as well as cultural factors contribute to both agenda setting and framing of Net neutrality. The differences between national discourses provide a way to understand both the structural differences between regulatory cultures and the substantive differences between policy interpretations, both of which must be reconciled for the Internet to continue to thrive as a global medium

Climate Change and the Limits of the Possible

Climate change looks to be more than just another environmental problem. It threatens to test the limits of our dominant ways of understanding and solving, not just environmental problems, but problems of political economy generally. Climate change has distinctive temporal and spatial features – how long it takes to unfold and the ways in which its effects are distributed across the globe – which may outstrip the capacity of our basic principles of economic and political decision-making. If so, then understanding the issue in a static way may ensure that we expect to fail in addressing it and are inarticulate about our prospects for success. That is, if we assume that economic and political decisions reflect the present distribution of self-interest within the existing structure of rules and institutions, we may be unable to see our way beyond the problem, because it so neatly frustrates the problem-solving power of our current arrangements. We may need, instead, to adopt a dynamic view of political econom

Gender and the Sharing Economy

While the sharing economy has been celebrated as a flexible alternative to traditional employment for those with family responsibilities, especially women, it presents challenges for gender equality. Many of the services that are “shared” take place in the context of intimacy, which can have substantial consequences for transacting, particularly by enhancing the importance of identity of both the worker and the customer. Expanding on previous research on intimate work — a critical area that exists largely in limbo between the law of the market and the law of the family — this Article, written for the Cooper-Walsh Colloquium, explores the significance of intimacy in the sharing economy and the implications for its regulation of the sharing economy and for sex equality. It argues that the intimacy of many sharing economy transactions heightens the salience of sex to these transactions, in tension with sex discrimination law’s goal of reducing the salience of sex in the labor market. But even if existing sex discrimination law extends to these transactions, the intimacy of the transactions again limits the law’s ability to promote gender equality in the same transformative way that it has in the traditional economy. The sharing economy thus raises serious concerns for proponents of sex equality

The Best for Last: The Timing of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

This Article investigates the hypothesis that the most important and, often, controversial and divisive cases—so called big cases—are disproportionately decided at the end of June. We define a big case in one of four ways: front-page coverage in the New York Times; front-page and other coverage in four national newspapers (the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune); the number of amicus curiae briefs filed in a case; and the number of subsequent citations by the Supreme Court to its decision in a case. We find a statistically significant association between each measure of a big case and end-of-term decisions even after controlling for the month of oral argument (cases argued later in the term are more likely to be decided near the end of the term) and case attributes (e.g., dissents and concurrences) that increase the time it takes to decide a case. We also speculate on why big cases cluster at the end of the term. One possibility is legacy and reputational concerns: when writing what they think will be a major decision, the Justices and their law clerks take more time polishing until the last minute with the hope of promoting their reputations. Another is that the end-of-term clustering of the most important cases may tend to diffuse media coverage of and other commentary regarding any particular case, and thus spare the Justices unwanted criticism just before they leave Washington for their summer recess

New Issues In The Study Of Infant Categorization: A Reply To Husaim And Cohen

Husaim and Cohen\u27s focus (Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 1981, 27, 443–456) on the learning of ill-defined categories by infants is securely motivated. Still, some of the particular questions they pursue—namely, how many dimensions are used to form the categories and what is the salience hierarchy of the dimensions—are tricky and perhaps misleading. Underlying their design and analysis is the basic assumption that the dimensions or attributes of the stimulus as defined by the experimenter have psychological reality for the infants. This assumption is questioned. Infants may perceive different attributes in the stimulus or they may not articulate the stimulus into attributes at all