Small and Large Cultures: Individuality, the Collective, Conformity and the Period of the Cold War

The Cold War is something I analyze in two parts.  First, I examine its politics, including political literatures and cultures large and small that concentrate on central concerns of the Cold War. Second, I discuss small and minor literatures in the period of the Cold War in theory and practice, including examples from the Netherlands and Canada that are in the period of the Cold War but do not focus on it as its primary concern or theme.  In these sections,  I argue for the centrality of the tension between tyranny and liberty, individual and the group, conformity and nonconformity and related matters. The article ranges in the politics of the Cold War from the background of Marx and Mill though Churchill, Stalin,  Truman, McCarthy to Russell, Grant and Ignatieff.  In literature, that is the Cold War in ink,  the essay analyzes Orwell’s essay on the nuclear bomb and his novels,  Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm as well as  Miller’s play, The Crucible and a poem by Einstein on Russell.  I concentrate on examples of Dutch fiction and their translation into English  and a Canadian novel,  The Weekend Man, by Richard B. Wright,   because they are an element of  “minority literatures.”   Besides  exploring the Cold War, I  briefly examine theories of minor or small literatures, including some aspects of the views of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor United Kingdom Monitoring Report 2010

This report compares Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) measures of entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspiration in the UK with participating G7 countries. It also summarizes entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspiration across the four nations of the UK and reports on entrepreneurs’ perceptions of the effect of the global recession on their businesses, awareness in the UK of Global Entrepreneurship week, and the incidence of intrapreneurship among employees in the UK

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor United Kingdom 2011 Monitoring Report

In 2011, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) research consortium measured entrepreneurial activity of individuals in 54 economies, making it the world’s most authoritative comparative study of entrepreneurial activity in the general adult population. In 2011, 10,573 adults aged 16 to 80 participated in the GEM UK survey. This monitoring report compares Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) measures of entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspirations in the UK, France, Germany and the United States, and the four home nations of the UK. It also examines the anticipated and actual challenges facing individuals starting a business in the UK. Attitudes of non-entrepreneurial individuals to entrepreneurship were more subdued than in 2010, reflecting uncertainties in the wider economy. • In the UK, 9.8% of working age adults expected to start a business within the next 3 years in 2011, compared with 15.8% in the US. Total early-stage entrepreneurial activity or TEA (the sum of the nascent entrepreneurship rate and the new business owner-manager rate - without double counting) in the UK in 2011 was 7.6%1. The rise in the UK TEA rate, while just not significantly different from the 2010 figure, appears to bring it beyond the historical trend (2002-2010) which was very stable at close to 6%. Despite the apparent rise in entrepreneurial activity in the UK since 2010, the gap with the US widened as a result of a sharp rise in the TEA rate in the US: the UK TEA rate was around twothirds (62%) of the US equivalent rate of 12.3% and above that of France (5.7%) and Germany (5.6%). When surveyed in mid-2011, 4.2% of the adult population in the UK were actively trying to start a business (nascent entrepreneurs), compared with 8.3% in the US. Nascent entrepreneurship rates in the UK, US, France and Germany rose between 2010 and 2011 – in fact, they doubled in the US. When surveyed in 2011, 3.4% of the UK working age adult population were owner-managers of a business that was 3 - 42 months old (new business ownermanagers). This is unchanged on the 2010 estimate of 3.4%, and it compares favourably with the estimate for France (1.7%) and Germany (2.4%) although it is slightly lower than the US (4.3%). In 2011, the proportion of the adult population who owned and managed a business older than 42 months (established business owner-managers) in the UK was 6.5%, similar to 2010 (6.2%). This was similar to Germany (5.6%), higher than in France (2.4%) but lower than in the US where the rate returned to pre-crisis levels at 9.1% after a dip since 2008. The estimated proportion of working age people in the UK who discontinued a business (whether through closure or sale) in the past 12 months rose slightly but not significantly to 1.6% from 1.2%, while they increased slightly to 2.9% in the US. On average, discontinuations by entrepreneurs of businesses in France and Germany were the same in 2011 as in 2010 (around 1.5%). The proportion of UK TEA entrepreneurs reporting new product/market combinations, export propensity and high or medium technology sectoral choices were just as high as in the US although fewer had high growth expectations. Necessity-driven early-stage entrepreneurship in the UK rose significantly in 2011 from 0.7% to 1.3%. In 2011, UK levels of female early-stage entrepreneurship (TEA rate of 5%) were 49% of male early-stage entrepreneurial activity – up from 44% in 2010. This is similar to France but in the US and Germany male and female TEA rates were much closer although they had widened since 2010. The sub-national distribution of TEA rates in 2011 was Scotland: 6.2%, Northern Ireland: 7.1%, England: 7.7% and Wales: 8.1%.These differences across the home nations were not statistically significant

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor : United Kingdom 2009 Monitoring Report

This monitoring report compares Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) measures of entrepreneurial attitudes and activity in the UK and participating G7 and BRIC countries. It also summarises entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspirations within Government Official Regions of the UK. It presents analysis on how the UK compares in terms of social entrepreneurial activity. It examines the views of entrepreneurs on the impact of the global recession on their own businesses. Finally, it reports expert views on the environment for entrepreneurship in the UK

Making the Invisible, Visible: RtI and Reading Comprehension

For the better part of a century the educational community has had increased focus on the importance of reading. The publication of Why Johnny Can\u27t Read and What You Can Do About It (Flesch, 1955) began the surge of effort to better understand the cognitive process of reading to further examine how educators can help children become better readers. Since this 1950\u27s publication, reading research grew and philosophies developed and subsequently changed. However, one thing remained the same: understanding what we read is critically important to becoming a critical thinker. Thus, reading comprehension research continued to boom and the educational community continues to seek ways in which reading comprehension instruction can be improved. (excerpt

Business and social entrepreneurs in the UK : gender, context and commitment

Objectives: What sort of people become social entrepreneurs, and in what way do they differ from business entrepreneurs? This question is important for policy because there has been a shift from direct to indirect delivery of many public services, requiring a professional approach to social enterprise. Yet we know little about who sets up social enterprises. Prior work: Much prior work on social entrepreneurs has been based on small and convenience samples, and this is true in the United Kingdom as elsewhere. An exception is work based on annual UK Global Entrepreneurship monitor (GEM) surveys (e.g. Levie et al., 2006). Approach: Defining and distinguishing business from social entrepreneurs is problematic. However, inclusion of items that measured the relative importance of economic, social and environmental goals in the 2009 UK GEM survey enables us to compare business and social entrepreneurs based on two different definitions: activity-based (setting up or running a new business or any kind of social, voluntary or community activity, venture or initiative) and goals-based (setting up or running a new organisation which has mainly economic goals versus mainly social goals). We use logistic multivariate regression techniques to identify differences between business and social entrepreneurs in demographic characteristics, effort, aspiration, use of resources, industry choice, location and organisational structure, identified from a representative sample of 30,000 adults interviewed in the United Kingdom in 2009. Results: The results show that the odds of an early-stage entrepreneur being a social rather than a business entrepreneur are reduced if they are male, from an ethnic minority, if they work 10 hours or more per week on the venture, and if they ever worked in their parents business, while they are increased if they have higher levels of education and if they are a settled in-migrant to their area. Implications: These results suggest that a high proportion of social enterprise founders are part-time founders. This could be a cause for concern for policy-makers keen to shift delivery of professional services from the public sector to a professional third sector. Future surveys could test if there is a hand-over of control from founders to full-time managers as social enterprises mature. Value: To our knowledge, this is the first time that large representative samples of business and social entrepreneurs have been compared using multivariate analysis. This type of research complements case-based research, enabling hypotheses raised by qualitative research to be tested on representative samples of a population

Freshwater Mussel Populations of the Monongahela River, PA and Evaluation of the ORSANCO Copper Pole Substrate Sampling Technique Using G.I.S. Interpolation with Geometric Means

Large river studies for freshwater mussel populations and habitat in the Monongahela River within Pennsylvania have been almost non-existent over the past century. Aquatic diversity and water quality have been impaired in the Monongahela River since the Industrial Revolution and early impoundments were constructed to control the river. To date, there have been no thorough mussel population studies conducted on the Pennsylvanian Monongahela River proper since A.E. Ortmann in 1919. The mussel population accounts for this large river system are invaluable accounts of the aquatic condition of the Monongahela River. Mussel populations and habitat within the river have diminished drastically during the 20 th century. Mussel populations and habitat were evaluated using SCUBA reconnaissance at 31 survey sites over 91 river miles. Survey methods included timed SCUBA searches for mussel populations and substrate consistency. Substrate habitat at each site was evaluated using diver reconnaissance and a modified version of the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO) Copper Pole Substrate Sampling Protocol. Substrate sampling efficacy using the Copper Pole sampling technique was evaluated using benthic diagrams built using Inverse Distance Weighting with software ArcGIS 9.2. Results of this survey indicated seven (7) mussel species persist within the river with limited abundance compared to the 28 species accounted for in 1919. Habitat assessment techniques evaluated for use in large rivers illustrated an overestimation of substrate size. Paired T-test and Wilcoxon Signed-Rank analysis of Copper Pole Sampling versus diver reconnaissance of substrate size classes expressed significant differences of substrate geometric means. These data are presented to build on the ever growing research and evaluation of techniques used for large river ecosystem monitoring currently being developed in the field of river ecolog

Mythology, Value-Judgements and Ideology in Northrop Frye's Anatomy and Beyond

Partiendo de Frye este trabajo pretende diferenciar entre mitología e ideología. En la Anatomía, se defiende que el estudio de la literatura debe ser autónomo respecto de sistemas filosóficos y de prejuicios y juicios de valor; se busca una perspectiva específicamente literaria que permita incluir todos los métodos. En obras posteriores, las reflexiones de Frye sobre el mito, la metáfora y la Biblia también esclarecen cuestiones sobre ideología. La literatura puede considerarse como vida del mito y la metáfora; trasciende la ideología y constituye una crítica de la crítica y de la vida. This essay tries to differentiate between mythology and ideology on the basis of Frye’s work. In the Anatomy, there is a defence of the autonomy of literary criticism against philosophical systems as well as against prejudice and value-judgements, and a search after a perspective where all methods can find their place. In later works, the reflections on myth, metaphor and the Bible shed also light on ideology. Literature may be seen as the life of myth and methafor, thus transcending ideology and being a critique of critique as well as of life

Unforgetting Private Charles Smith

Private Charles Smith had been dead for close to a century when Jonathan Hart discovered the soldier’s small diary in the Baldwin Collection at the Toronto Public Library. The diary’s first entry was marked 28 June 1915. After some research, Hart discovered that Charles Smith was an Anglo-Canadian, born in Kent, and that this diary was almost all that remained of this forgotten man, who like so many soldiers from ordinary families had lost his life in the First World War. In reading the diary, Hart discovered a voice full of life, and the presence of a rhythm, a cadence that urged him to bring forth the poetry in Smith’s words. Unforgetting Private Charles Smith is the poetic setting of the words in Smith’s diary, work undertaken by Hart with the intention of remembering Smith’s life rather than commemorating his death.illustrato