Network models : an assessment

This article – based on a larger study (Pawelec 2009) – has two aims. The more limited one is to present network models proposed by Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff. I try to show that both ventures rest on manifestly different assumptions, contrary to the widespread view that they are convergent or complementary. Langacker’s declared aim is “descriptive adequacy”: his model serves as a global representation of linguistic intuitions, rooted in convention. Lakoff, on the other hand, offers a developmental model: a fairly general abstract schema is “imagistically” specified and transformed, while the more specific schemas serve as the basis for metaphorical transfers. My wider aim is to offer a preliminary assessment of theoretical justifications and practical potential of network models in lexical semantics

"O lawful let it be / That I have room ... to curse a while" : voicing the nation's conscience in female complaint in Richard III, King John and Henry VIII

To understand what drives this female‐led quest for justice we must situate this as a response to the traumas of the recent past which still convulse the respective play‐worlds, whether the legacy of internecine strife from the War of the Roses that imprints itself upon the fractured court of Richard III, the unresolved struggle over the succession in King John, or the upheavals of the English Reformation in Henry VIII. Each of these plays evokes a profoundly dysfunctional society where the normal patrilineal structures of authority and legitimate succession have broken down, where oaths are routinely violated, theology is manipulated for political gain, and the law perverted to serve the will of individuals, instead of the bono publico. What is undeniably catastrophic for the body politic, though, proves oddly enabling for the plays' female protagonists

The Market Economy, and the Scientific Commons

It is widely believed that while society allows technology to be private property, scientific knowledge is public and open. However, over the past quarter-century there has been increasing patenting of quite basic scientific knowledge. This essay argues that this is potentially a very serious problem. The future development of technology, as well as the future progress of science, is greatly facilitated when basic scientific knowledge is public and open. The paper explores the various factors that have led to the growing privatization of scientific knowledge. And it explores a variety of policy changes that can stop, and even reverse, these trends.Science, Technology, Patents, Open Knowledge.

Network models: an assessment

This article – based on a larger study (Pawelec 2009) – has two aims. The more limited one is to present network models proposed by Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff. I try to show that both ventures rest on manifestly different assumptions, contrary to the widespread view that they are convergent or complementary. Langacker’s declared aim is “descriptive adequacy”: his model serves as a global representation of linguistic intuitions, rooted in convention. Lakoff, on the other hand, offers a developmental model: a fairly general abstract schema is “imagistically” specified and transformed, while the more specific schemas serve as the basis for metaphorical transfers. My wider aim is to offer a preliminary assessment of theoretical justifications and practical potential of network models in lexical semantics

A Place in the World: A Review of the Global Debate on Tenure Security

Draws upon more than 50 years of academic debate and the evolution of four distinct traditions of land tenure analysis to review the issue of property rights and the creation of sustainable community livelihoods

Engineering cities: mediating materialities, infrastructural imaginaries and shifting regimes of urban expertise

This symposium opens up new critical insights and analytical perspectives into the relationships between power, politics, materiality and urban engineering. In so doing it demonstrates the central role of engineers in the production and negotiation of everyday life in the city. In contrast to the technocratic exercise engineering often professes to be, the contributors to this symposium argue that the assembling and choreography of cities through the myriad techniques, routines, standards and visions of engineers is inextricably bound up with broader socio‐cultural, material and political urban dynamics and processes. This necessitates investigating the multiple and competing social imaginations, forms of knowledge and regimes of expertise associated with urban engineering. The symposium's five articles, straddling disciplinary backgrounds in geography, anthropology, engineering and history, focus analytical and empirical attention on the figure of the engineer and on the work of engineering in the cities of Paris, Mumbai, Singapore and London. Engineering, we suggest, is a diagnostic for probing the shifting forms of mediation that animate and inhabit contemporary dynamics of urban change. The symposium thus opens up a new avenue for cross‐disciplinary and transregional research for urban studies while also suggesting innovative ways of conceptualizing urban transformation and contestation

The Law of Trade Secrets: Toward a More Efficient Approach

Trade secret law must efficiently protect that which can be considered a trade secret. Were the law to provide too little protection, information protected as a trade secret would not be created. Were the law to provide too much protection, competition would be unnecessarily stifled. Only efficient protection, meaning neither too little nor too much, appropriately addresses the unique nature of trade secrets as intellectual property. Such a conclusion becomes increasingly necessary given the rising import of trade secret law in the spectrum of intellectual property. It is the policy of the law, for the advantage of the public, to encourage and protect invention and commercial enterprise. With this, the first sentence in Peabody v. Norfolk, states began to recognize that the law must protect commercial secrets to insure that those secrets will be developed. Despite the threats of preemption by the federal patent scheme, state trade secret law remains essential to providing incentives for innovation. In addition, courts have noted that trade secret law exists to institute a form of commercial morality, to impose certain ethical standards on business relationships. Absorbed by this potential of mandating morality, courts have molded trade secret law in ways that frustrate the notion that trade secret law should provide efficient incentives to create. The ultimate focus of this Note is to identify the truly efficient nature of the protection afforded by state trade secret law. Further, this Note seeks to identify the importance of efficient intellectual property protection. This Note contends that courts should abandon those aspects of trade secret law more recently grafted onto its efficiency underpinnings with hopes of mandating commercial morality. Part II first identifies the need for promoting efficient outcomes through intellectual property laws. Part II continues by discussing the extent to which the two most relevant forms of protection granted to commercially valuable ideas, trade secret law and patent law, create efficient outcomes. Part III identifies the current state of trade secret law. Finally, Part IV presents a form of trade secret law that appropriately promotes the law\u27s efficient outcomes

The Space of dictatorship: Monénembo, hidden transcripts, and a metonymy of violence

This article centers on the representation of dictatorship by Guinean author Tierno Monénembo and aims to elucidate his fictional writing by reading it against recent theories on violence and sovereignty. In line with Nganang's notion of protestas, a metonymic chain of violence emerges in a number of forms: spectacular and subtle, physical and psychological. These constitute what Scott labels a "dramaturgy of domination" (Domination and the Arts of Resistance). Disparity between public and hidden transcripts perpetuates a state of tension but also reveals spaces of dissent. In texts that not only denounce the crimes of Touré's regime, but critique the ongoing injustices enacted in Guinea and elsewhere, Monénembo writes resistance as a commitment to combating this violence, which is characterized by débrouillard practice. His fictional subjects' capacity to move between worlds responds to calls for a wider recasting of African subjectivity

The Story of Colonialism, or Rethinking the Ox-Hide Purchase in Native North America and Beyond

In this paper I offer a comparative assessment of the ox-hide purchase narrative (tale type AT 2400, ATU 927C*; Motif K185.1) in Native North America. Drawing on my own fieldwork and the beginnings of a historic-geographic treatment, I consider the story from the perspective of work on historical consciousness in Native North America and treat it as an opportunity to establish a link between folkloristics and other fields concerned with interpreting the legacies of colonialism