Why do many animals move with a predominance of roughly forward directions?

Animal movements can influence their ecology and demographics. Animal movements are often characterized by path structures with directional persistence. The extent to which directional persistence improves forage success is investigated in this paper using theoretical simulations. It is shown that a movement strategy with directional persistence enables simulated animals to find more forage as compared to a random movement strategy. Situations where resources are chosen with certainty (optimally) are even more successful. Choosing resource with certainty cannot result in directional persistence. However, in cases where animals choose with certainty adjacent cells with resource but continue in their existing direction if none of these have resources then results include directional persistence. It is posited here that this combined strategy is the most effective because if optimal foraging works it is optimally efficient but where foraging is sub-optimal, for a variety of reasons, directional persistence will benefit foraging

Diversity in the Irish workplace - lesbian women's experience as nurses

Work is an area which represents an important part of people’s lives where they encounter the Other. It provides an individual with a sense of who they are in society, through their membership of communities. Through work, a lesbian woman’s identity has to be negotiated as private lives and public lives can overlap. For lesbian women, work and identity intersect, providing a coherent sense of accomplishment. Research has shown that lesbian women are aware of the attitudes that prevail about lesbian women in the health care environment as they encounter them in their working lives: homophobia; lack of social support and understanding leading to non-disclosure of their own sexuality. Lesbian nurses work within the institution of medicine that reflects societal heterosexual norms. The methodology derived from the qualitative tradition employing hermeneutic phenomenology. It presents an original conceptualisation and consistent application of theoretical frameworks of Heidegger and Sartre. Interviews were conducted between March 2006 and April 2007 with seven lesbian nurses. Lesbian nurses in Ireland remain in the “closet” leading some lesbian nurses to experience social isolation. This paper argues that being oneself is difficult for lesbian nurses who work in the heteronormative culture of Irish hospitals

The differential point of view of the infinitesimal calculus in Spinoza, Leibniz and Deleuze

In Hegel ou Spinoza,1 Pierre Macherey challenges the influence of Hegel’s reading of Spinoza by stressing the degree to which Spinoza eludes the grasp of the Hegelian dialectical progression of the history of philosophy. He argues that Hegel provides a defensive misreading of Spinoza, and that he had to “misread him” in order to maintain his subjective idealism. The suggestion being that Spinoza’s philosophy represents, not a moment that can simply be sublated and subsumed within the dialectical progression of the history of philosophy, but rather an alternative point of view for the development of a philosophy that overcomes Hegelian idealism. Gilles Deleuze also considers Spinoza’s philosophy to resist the totalising effects of the dialectic. Indeed, Deleuze demonstrates, by means of Spinoza, that a more complex philosophy antedates Hegel’s, which cannot be supplanted by it. Spinoza therefore becomes a significant figure in Deleuze’s project of tracing an alternative lineage in the history of philosophy, which, by distancing itself from Hegelian idealism, culminates in the construction of a philosophy of difference. It is Spinoza’s role in this project that will be demonstrated in this paper by differentiating Deleuze’s interpretation of the geometrical example of Spinoza’s Letter XII (on the problem of the infinite) in Expressionism in Philosophy, Spinoza,2 from that which Hegel presents in the Science of Logic.

Religion, Mathematics and Nothing

The concept of "nothing" is important in both mathematics and theology. Its most obvious use in mathematics is in the number zero which arrived in Western Europe in the 12th Century. In theology it features significantly in the dogma of creaho ex nihilo, which was taught by a Council in 1215 c.e. Noting the relative proximity of these two events leads to the research task described in this essay: an exploration of the influence of mathematics on theology, with respect to the notion of nothing

Religion, Mathematics and Nothing

The concept of "nothing" is important in both mathematics and theology. Its most obvious use in mathematics is in the number zero which arrived in Western Europe in the 12th Century. In theology it features significantly in the dogma of creaho ex nihilo, which was taught by a Council in 1215 c.e. Noting the relative proximity of these two events leads to the research task described in this essay: an exploration of the influence of mathematics on theology, with respect to the notion of nothing