Colmcille and the Battle of the Book: Technology, Law and Access to Knowledge in 6th Century Ireland

Many hundreds of years before the GPL was even a twinkle in Richard Stallman's eye, an Irish monk proved to be an unlikely champion of the geeky A2K notion of access to knowledge. The short version of the story of Colmcille and the battle of the book goes something like this - One monk copied another monk's manuscript. The second monk objected and they settled things the way they did in those days, with 3000 people getting killed in the resulting battle. The interesting thing from the A2K (access to knowledge) perspective is that there was an attempt, prior to the battle, to settle the dispute in the Irish High Court at the time; and remarkably, the arguments invoked in that hearing could have come straight out of one of the modern digital copyright disputes. Have attitudes to law and technology really changed a whole lot in 1400 years

Comment: The coming tornado?

An extended review of John S. Daniel's Mega‐Universities and the Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education (London: Kogan Page, 1996; 212 pages, ISBN: 0–7494–2119–3)

In praise of negation

Der Autor entwickelt eine kulturanthropologische und soziolinguistische Würdigung der Negation. Neinsagen gehört zu jeder aktiven Auseinandersetzung mit sozialen und sprachlichen Ordnungsmustern, die hierdurch für neue Erfahrungsmöglichkeiten geöffnet werden können. An Beispielen aus der Eheberatung, der Hausaufgabenbetreuung sowie der Lehrerbildung wird gezeigt, dass Affirmation und Negation, Lob und Tadel sprachlichen Äußerungen nicht unmittelbar abzulesen sind, sondern erst in einem komplexen sozialen Zusammenhang identifizierbar werden, auf den sprachliche Äußerungen reagieren und den sie zugleich mitkonstituieren. Eine solche Sichtweise ermöglicht auch einen veränderten Blick auf Schulleistungen und die Instrumente zu ihrer immer engmaschigeren Erfassung. Bessere und schlechtere Leistungen sind stets auch als diagnostische Zuschreibungen in einem komplexen Handlungszusammenhang anzusehen, der Erfolg und Versagen sowie ihre statistische Verteilung laufend mitproduziert. Eine Bildungspolitik, die einseitig auf die Fortschritte pädagogischer Leistungsdiagnostik setzt, könnte vergessen machen, dass Erziehung nicht allein ein Prozess der Einführung in kulturelle Ordnungen ist, sondern eben dabei auch den Sinn dafür öffnen muss, was wir nicht sind oder was wir - auch jenseits etablierter Ordnungen - sein könnten. (DIPF/Orig.

Promising Practices: Massachusetts Association of Benefits Specialists

The Massachusetts Association of Benefits Specialists (MABS) was formed in 2001 by three SSA funded organizations in Massachusetts: Project Impact, BenePlan and the Disability Law Center. The Massachusetts Benefits Planning, Assistance and Outreach and Protection and Advocacy for Beneficiaries of Social Security grantees banded together to provide efficient, high quality planning and legal assistance to disabled and blind social security recipients attempting to return to, or enter, the work force. MABS has allowed for cooperative training and resource development in a manner to allow the three participating organizations to stretch limited resources to provide services to a significant number of individuals. The hows, whats and whys are explored in this Promising Practice Brief

More Than Memories? Schema Transference from Media Characters to Real People

This study focused on whether personality traits and evaluations of television personalities are used to make inferences about new Social interaction partners. It tested the hypothesis that priming schemas of television personalities will bias inferences made about a stranger. The results were mixed. Participants in the experimental condition made more biased inferences about a stranger than did participants in the control condition. This transference was not influenced by participants\u27 parasociability, and methodological limitations prevented conclusive study of the influence of affective evaluations in this effect. Future studies should attempt to increase methodological control and introduce a diverse set of measures to test for possible mediating and moderating variables

Life without theory: biography as an exemplar of philosophical understanding

This article discusses recent attempts to provide the genre of biography with a philosophical, theoretical foundation and attempts to show that such efforts are fundamentally misguided. Biography is, I argue, a profoundly nontheoretical activity, and this, precisely, makes it philosophically interesting. Instead of looking to philosophy to provide a theory of biography, we should, I maintain, look to biography to provide a crucially important example and model of what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "the kind of understanding that consists in seeing connections." This kind of understanding stands in sharp contrast to the theoretical understanding provided by science and is, Wittgenstein maintained, what we as philosophers are, or should be, striving for