Larry Wos - Visions of automated reasoning

This paper celebrates the scientific discoveries and the service to the automated reasoning community of Lawrence (Larry) T. Wos, who passed away in August 2020. The narrative covers Larry's most long-lasting ideas about inference rules and search strategies for theorem proving, his work on applications of theorem proving, and a collection of personal memories and anecdotes that let readers appreciate Larry's personality and enthusiasm for automated reasoning

Set of support, demodulation, paramodulation: a historical perspective

This article is a tribute to the scientific legacy of automated reasoning pioneer and JAR founder Lawrence T. (Larry) Wos. Larry's main technical contributions were the set-of-support strategy for resolution theorem proving, and the demodulation and paramodulation inference rules for building equality into resolution. Starting from the original definitions of these concepts in Larry's papers, this survey traces their evolution, unearthing the often forgotten trails that connect Larry's original definitions to those that became standard in the field

Karl Marx on Wage Labour: From Natural Abstraction to Formal Sumsumption

Marx develops two different theories of the employment contract. According to the first, it is an agreement for the sale of a commodity whereby the worker cedes a flow of abstract labour springing from a stock of labour power. Such a commodity seems to be a natural abstraction, a substance with the properties of a productive force. Exploitation occurs when the exchange value of the flow of labour power is lower than the value-creating capacity of abstract labour. According to the second theory, the employment contract is a transaction establishing the worker’s subordination to the capitalist and the subsumption of his productive abilities under capital. This is an illuminating anticipation of the modern theory of the employment contract as an institution determining an authority relationship. It is not liable to criticisms of essentialism and naturalism and is able to sustain a consistent and realistic account of capitalist exploitation as being based on the command the capitalist exerts in the production process. Now abstract labour is seen not as a productive force, but as the expression of a social relationship, and is considered an abstraction that is real in a historical sense rather than in a natural sense

Kazuo Ishiguro and the Service Economy

In her article, “Kazuo Ishiguro and the Service Economy,” Kate Montague argues that Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels enact a poetics of work for the present moment—not just at the level of narrative but also in the kind of language used to describe the service economies his characters are doomed to inhabit. In his best-known novels, a clinical, bureaucratic, and even glorifying lexicon of “donations,” “completions,” “substitutions,” and “lifting” is betrayed by the reality of work grounded in horror. In Ishiguro’s worlds, which are very much our own, the out-sourcing of reproductive and domestic labor is enabled by a larger system in which state technologies as well as linguistic forms mark certain bodies as readily exploitable and disposable. Looking comparatively between dystopian literary form and recent critical work on the service and care industries, the article shows how the tension between a euphemistic language of service and a social logic of mass death speaks to our own moment and to a crisis of care that, after years of austerity and now a global pandemic, defines the present

Making It Pay to be a Fan: The Political Economy of Digital Sports Fandom and the Sports Media Industry

This dissertation is a series of case studies and sociological examinations of the role that the sports media industry and mediated sport fandom plays in the political economy of the Internet. The Internet has structurally changed the way that sport fans access sport and accelerated the processes through which the capitalist actors in the sports media industry have been able to subsume them. The three case studies examined in this dissertation are examples of how digital media technologies have both helped fans become more active producers and consumers of sports and made the sports media industry an integral and vanguard component of the cultural industry. The first case study is of Bleacher Report, a fan blogging platform turned major digital sports journalism company. Bleacher Report’s journey from an industry-reviled content farm to major player in digital sports journalism is traced to argue that Bleacher Report’s business model relied on the desperation of aspiring writers only as long as those writers were unpaid. The second case study is of DraftKings and Fanduel, the industry leaders in the fantasy sports genre of daily fantasy sports (DFS). These two companies have seemingly overnight taken over the new field but just as quickly thrust themselves into legal scrutiny that threatened to shut down the entire field of DFS. The proximity to gambling that threatened their legal status also, whoever, belies their relationship to the financialized understanding of that all of fantasy sports represents. The third and final case study is of ESPN. By far the oldest and most powerful of the three cases, ESPN, the self-proclaimed “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” has made the majority of its money off its innovation of the per subscriber fee, or the fee that ESPN charges cable companies to carry it that is then passed onto individual subscribers whether they watch ESPN or not. As digital technologies have revolutionized the delivery of visual images of sport and the cable bundle that ESPN is the most expensive part of loses market share, ESPN’s ability to monetize both attention and non-attention greatly decreases. The concluding chapter takes these case studies and attempts to synthesize them into a theory of what is termed “contentification,” or the tendency of digital technologies to take disparate forms of records (text, numbers, images) and treat them as “content” to be paid attention to. Sports are particularly prone to contentification and have helped drive the exponential expansion of content to be paid attention to that has resulted in a crisis of attention where the amount of content outstrips the human capacity to take it in. The reconfiguration of capital that finds its expression in the ending of net neutrality is the response to this crisis

Clinical psychologist responsible clinicians: exploring experiences and factors influencing uptake of the role

Section A presents a systematic literature review of the empirical research of the factors (barriers and facilitators) influencing uptake of the Multi-Professional Approved Clinician role by mental health professionals, other than psychiatrists. Seven studies were identified from the systematic search. Barriers and facilitators were categorised into internal and external factors. Internal factors included: attitudes, and knowledge and skills. External factors included: organisational structures, resources and peer support. A critical evaluation of the studies is discussed, and the practical and research implications are considered. Section B presents a qualitative study exploring the experiences of clinical psychologists in the role of Responsible Clinician. Eight clinical psychologists who had been working as responsible clinicians were interviewed, and interviews were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Five superordinate themes and accompanying subthemes capturing the experiences of the participants were identified. The superordinate themes are: “From psychologist to approved clinician psychologist”, “The psychological effects of responsibility”, “The system makes or breaks”, “Relationships shift in the face of power”, and “Making our mark: From paralysis to influence”. Findings are discussed in the context of existing literature. Clinical implications, as well as limitations and directions for future research, are also considered