Asian Varieties of Service Capitalism?

There is currently only limited empirical research and theoretical conceptualisation of the role of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) in the economies of Asia within economic geography or elsewhere in the wider social scientific literature. This paper argues that existing theoretical understandings of KIBS are inadequate to conceptualise the nature of ongoing KIBS development in Asian economies – both emerging and mature – and seeks to address this absence by developing a theoretical framework that draws on a range of existing theoretical approaches within and beyond economic geography. To do this, it proposes the concept of ‘service capitalism’, developed from work concerned with varieties of capitalism (VoC), variegated capitalism and advanced service industries. The paper elaborates its theoretical argument by presenting research into two forms of Asian service capitalism through two case studies examining respectively the specific nature of Japanese KIBS and the development of KIBS in China. Using the case studies, it demonstrates how service industry development in both these Asian economies exhibits distinctive characteristics that are a consequence of both local institutional, corporate, and socio-cultural contexts but are also interconnected the wider global economy in complex ways. The paper thus presents a significant and disruptive challenge to existing theories of KIBS development as based on the western experience, and contemporary deployments of the varieties of capitalism and variegated capitalism approaches

Dynamic Package Interfaces - Extended Version

A hallmark of object-oriented programming is the ability to perform computation through a set of interacting objects. A common manifestation of this style is the notion of a package, which groups a set of commonly used classes together. A challenge in using a package is to ensure that a client follows the implicit protocol of the package when calling its methods. Violations of the protocol can cause a runtime error or latent invariant violations. These protocols can extend across different, potentially unboundedly many, objects, and are specified informally in the documentation. As a result, ensuring that a client does not violate the protocol is hard. We introduce dynamic package interfaces (DPI), a formalism to explicitly capture the protocol of a package. The DPI of a package is a finite set of rules that together specify how any set of interacting objects of the package can evolve through method calls and under what conditions an error can happen. We have developed a dynamic tool that automatically computes an approximation of the DPI of a package, given a set of abstraction predicates. A key property of DPI is that the unbounded number of configurations of objects of a package are summarized finitely in an abstract domain. This uses the observation that many packages behave monotonically: the semantics of a method call over a configuration does not essentially change if more objects are added to the configuration. We have exploited monotonicity and have devised heuristics to obtain succinct yet general DPIs. We have used our tool to compute DPIs for several commonly used Java packages with complex protocols, such as JDBC, HashSet, and ArrayList.Comment: The only changes compared to v1 are improvements to the Abstract and Introductio

Remember the Ladies: Individuality, Community, and Equality of Early and Modern Women

As scholars in the twenty-first century, we’ve defined the “modern” era, in part, in terms of the increasing value placed upon the individual. Yet, “modernity” also encompasses the growing tensions between the individual and his or her community. The contemporary paradox, therefore, is how social modernization shifts from a linear progression from a hierarchal communal identity, to a level playing field of vibrant individualism and equality. How do we fortify strong communities without establishing unequal hierarchies? How can we, in the technological age, advocate individual pursuits while reinforcing communal bonds? In addition to Abigail Adams, in her personal correspondence, historians and writers Bernard Bailyn (The Peopling of British North America), Antonine-Nicholas de Condorcet (Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind), Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre), Mary Beth Norton (Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women), Ishmael Reed (Dualism: In Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”), and Gordon Wood (The Radicalism of the American Revolution), tackle this modern dilemma, discovering that, although community, individuality, and equality initially conflict, these themes are reconcilable, their discrepancies central to truly understanding modernity

Development of a Workshop for Older Adult Volunteers Using a Life Strengths Guide With Clients

The purpose of this project is to develop a training workshop that teaches older adult volunteers about a Life Strengths Interview Guide that can be used when working with clients. The framework of the workshop focuses on Erik Erikson\u27s life cycle theory with a strengths perspective. The interview guide is divided into eight sections that relate to Erikson\u27s eight psychosocial stages of life. Each section contains questions related to a specific stage in life and is intended to get the client talking about the strengths that are found in these specific areas of his or her life. The workshop is intended to give older adult volunteers who will be using the guide with their clients some background on the stages of life, information on the importance of looking for strengths in older adulthood, and practice in how to apply the questions in the guide to their work with clients

The Art Material Girl--A Guide to Save and Find Funding for Art Materials

The current economic situation in the U.S. has demanded budget cuts in all areas of American life, including education. Faced with these unprecedented cuts, many arts programs are losing their funding. Many art educators are finding it a challenge to provide art education without compromising the quality of the curriculum and program. Through a comparative analysis of materials and fundraisers and a document analysis of money saving tips, strategies are suggested for art teachers to save and find money

The origin of planetary impactors in the inner solar system

New insights into the history of the inner solar system are derived from the impact cratering record of the Moon, Mars, Venus and Mercury, and from the size distributions of asteroid populations. Old craters from a unique period of heavy bombardment that ended $\sim$3.8 billion years ago were made by asteroids that were dynamically ejected from the main asteroid belt, possibly due to the orbital migration of the giant planets. The impactors of the past $\sim$3.8 billion years have a size distribution quite different from the main belt asteroids, but very similar to the population of near-Earth asteroids.Comment: 12 pages (including 4 figures

Euler Integration of Gaussian Random Fields and Persistent Homology

In this paper we extend the notion of the Euler characteristic to persistent homology and give the relationship between the Euler integral of a function and the Euler characteristic of the function's persistent homology. We then proceed to compute the expected Euler integral of a Gaussian random field using the Gaussian kinematic formula and obtain a simple closed form expression. This results in the first explicitly computable mean of a quantitative descriptor for the persistent homology of a Gaussian random field.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figur