Are Persons Members of a Natural Kind?

A quick answer to the question posed by the title is that they may be. Since the prevailing consensus - I think it is fair to say - regards persons not to be members of a natural kind, a longer answer is required. Sketching an outline of how that answer might proceed is the purpose of the present paper

On The Content and Character of Pain Experience

Tracking representationalism explains the negative affective character of pain, and its capacity to motivate action, by reference to the representation of the badness for us of bodily damage. I argue that there is a more fitting instantiation of the tracking relation – the badness for us of extremely intense stimuli – and use this to motivate a non-reductive approach to the negative affective character of pain. The view of pain proposed here is supported by consideration of three related topics: the pain caused when the body is damaged, reparative pain, and the messenger-shooting objection to tracking representationalism

[Review] Anders Blok and Torben Elgaard Jensen (2011) Bruno Latour: hybrid thoughts in a hybrid world

A review of Blok and Jensen's introduction to the thought of Bruno Latour

Beyond the Margins: Identity Fragmentation in Visual Representation in Michel Tournier’s La Goutte d’or

In Tournier’s novel, the goutte d’or also corresponds to a symbolic object: a Berber jewel. It is the jewel that Idriss brings with him, but which he also subsequently loses upon his arrival in Marseille. From the very moment that the French tourist photographs him, a marginalization of Idriss’s identity occurs. Marginality, quite literally, refers to the spatial property of a location in which something is situated. Figuratively speaking, marginality suggests something that is on the edges or at the outer limits of social acceptability. In this essay, I explore the construction of the marginalized postcolonial self (the “Other”) through an examination of the function of visual representation in the development of a postcolonial identity in La Goutte d’or. In the end, I conclude that the construction of a postcolonial identity is based upon fragmentation and marginalization, which ultimately leads its subject to create an identity based upon false constructions

Agriculture and the WTO: Future Directions in the Grain and Oilseed Sectors

This paper examines the larger economic forces that shape multilateral trade agreements and concludes that further WTO trade reform in the grain and oilseed sectors will be difficult to achieve. The somewhat successful Uruguay Round had budget and internal reform pressure to assist the process. The United States currently has large budget surpluses, and efficiency effects from policy reform following the Uruguay Round have reduced the possible gains from further domestic reform. Without these pressures, further negotiated reform in the grain and oilseed sectors is a remote possibility. On the other hand, there are good prospects for a multilateral environmental agreement on climate change. Ratification of a climate change agreement could have a large impact on the grain and oilseed sectors as such an agreement would divert excess resources from food production.carbon sequestration, food security, grain, Kyoto Accord, oilseed, International Relations/Trade,

Noninnocence in Metal Complexes: A Dithiolene Dawn

Noninnocence in inorganic chemistry traces its roots back half a century to work that was done on metal complexes containing unsaturated dithiolate ligands. In a flurry of activity in the early 1960s by three different research groups, homoleptic bis and tris complexes of these ligands, which came to be known as dithiolenes, were synthesized, and their structural, electrochemical, spectroscopic, and magnetic properties were investigated. The complexes were notable for facile one-electron transfers and intense colors in solution, and conventional oxidation-state descriptions could not account for their electronic structures. The bis complexes were, in general, found to be square-planar, including the first examples of this geometry for paramagnetic complexes and different formal dn configurations. Several of the neutral and monoanionic tris complexes were found to have trigonal-prismatic coordination, the first time that this geometry had been observed in molecular metal complexes. Electronic structural calculations employing extended Hückel and other semiempirical computational methods revealed extensive ligand–metal mixing in the frontier orbitals of these systems, including the observation of structures in which filled metal-based orbitals were more stable than ligand-based orbitals of the same type, suggesting that the one-electron changes upon oxidation or reduction were occurring on the ligand rather than on the metal center. A summary of this early work is followed with a brief section on the current interpretations of these systems based on more advanced spectroscopic and computational methods. The take home message is that the early work did indeed provide a solid foundation for what was to follow in investigations of metal complexes containing redox-active ligands

Masters' courses in the education of adults in the UK

This is a paper from the Academic Papers Online series from ESCalate, written by John Field, Richard Dockrell, Peter Gray in 2005. Universities provide a range of advanced qualifications for professionals who support adult learners. Describing and evaluating this body of work, though, poses something of a challenge. The field of continuing education is a broad one, which has been widened further by current government policies promoting lifelong learning, as well as by increased concerns for quality improvement among providers in further and higher education. Qualifications are accordingly offered under a variety of different titles: many universities now offer taught postgraduate courses in areas such as lifelong learning, continuing education, post-compulsory education and training or adult education. This report examines the background against which these courses developed, and explores a number of curricular and organisational issues associated with them. It includes, as an appendix, a list of courses currently offered in British higher education institution

Crop Research Incentives in a Privatized Industry: A Stochastic Approach

We model today's privatized crop research industry as a small number of firms, developing and selling differentiated products to heterogeneous producers. Crop variety research is modeled as a search process, which allows us to differentiate between applied and basic research and recognize research as a stochastic process. We use the framework to develop a number of propositions regarding private research incentives, the spillovers of knowledge, and the impact of public policy. The results suggest an underinvestment in research even when property rights have been established.search process, stochastic process, biotechnology, IPRs, applied R&D, basic R&D, imperfect competition, differentiated products, heterogeneous producers., Agribusiness,

AN ANALYTICAL AND EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PRIVATE BIOTECH R&D INCENTIVES

The study examines the incentives and incidence of private R&D investment in the today's biotech industry. A three-stage search/imperfect competition model is developed to derive the optimal pricing and investment decisions of private firms and to develop conjectures about how these decisions are affected by exogenous factors. The analysis shows that basic public research "crowds in" applied private research while applied public research "crowds out" applied private research. The current technology level and the cost of the experimentation negatively affect private investment, while the price of the final product positively affects the private investment. Moreover, the greater the product heterogeneity, the higher the price charged with the same amount of R&D. Finally, the increase in IPR's and the firm's market size has a positive effect on the private firm's amount of R&D investment. These conjectures are tested empirically using data from the Canola research industry. The results of the empirical analysis strongly support the results derived from the theoretical model.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

STATE TRADING VERSUS EXPORT SUBSIDIES: THE CASE OF CANADIAN WHEAT

Canada and the United States have used different trade policies to support their wheat industries. Canada conferred sole export powers to the Canadian Wheat Board, allowing it to price discriminate among markets. The U.S. government has funded transfers to its wheat producers from taxpayers, instead, through export subsidies. This study compares these two ways of supporting producers in terms of their transfer efficiency and overall deadweight losses, the incidence on different domestic interest groups, and their consequences for third party traders. In the analysis we consider the implications of market power of wheat marketing firms for the comparison of policy alternatives in the context of the Canadian wheat industry.International Relations/Trade,