Book Review: Introduction to Commercial Transactions (1977)

Book review of INTRODUCTION TO COMMERCIAL TRANSACTIONS, by Robert Braucher & Robert A. Riegert (NY: The Foundation Press, 1977)

Spellbound...?: A hermeneutic response to disillusionment in the contemporary university

Universities occupy an important place in the world’s economies, and the idea and purpose of the university is a question that has historically received considerable attention. In recent years, a state of disillusionment among UK academics has been observed, and attributed in part to a belief that the economic mandate of the contemporary university has become alienated from its academic mission. This thesis aims to further explore and understand this disillusionment in context, through eliciting the experiences and conceptions of teachers, students, and managers—groups that are also, in a sense, alienated from one another—and ‘bringing them into conversation’. The thesis presents a framework of ideas pertaining to disillusionment as a state of mind, including disenchantment as a corresponding state of world and its opposite, enchantment. It uses these concepts to build a theory of disillusionment in the university, drawing on a novel methodology that is informed by philosophical hermeneutics and justified in ethical terms as a responsive vacillation between the modes of understanding and explanation. At the heart of the thesis is a semi-fictional conversation that has been created by weaving together excerpts from transcripts of individual interviews. It is fictional in the sense that the interaction between the individuals is imagined, and truthful in its intention to represent faithfully the histories and experiences of the teachers, students, and senior managers who participated. The aim of this creative act is to present a fusion of real perspectives on the university. Presented alongside the conversation is a commentary that documents the author’s encounter with it as a reader. The commentary highlights tensions, contradictions, and inconsistencies as the author perceives them to emerge from the conversation, and links these with the theoretical and methodological issues discussed in previous chapters. The thesis concludes by advancing a theory of (dis)illusionment in the university. Having shown that the idea of the university is replete with contradiction, and as such constitutes an ‘impossible object’, illusionment is proposed as an alternative state of mind (to disillusionment) in which one is able to hold contradictory and/or inconsistent ideas. The specific context of the specialist arts university in which the conversations take place is proposed to be significant, with reference to the tolerance of contradiction demonstrated by the characters in the conversation and the participants whose voices they represent. The thesis offers an original contribution to knowledge that has both methodological and disciplinary aspects. While its methodological approach and framing of findings may not be considered experimental by those undertaking scholarly activity in the type of specialist arts institution in which this research is situated, the playful and imaginative approach to data analysis documented here has not previously been applied to the study of higher education itself. In terms of higher education philosophy and theory, the thesis also makes a novel contribution to an understanding of disillusionment in the university, and some of the practical implications of this

Just Sign Here--It\u27s Only a Formality : Parol Evidence in the Law of Commercial Paper

Part I will argue that certainty is especially important in the law of negotiable instruments, although it does not outweigh all other values. In light of the need for certain rules, this Article will consider the policy choices made by the drafters of the Uniform Commercial Code\u27s Article 3 on Commercial Paper with respect to parol evidence. Part II will examine certain parol evidence that is admissible against even the law\u27s most favored plaintiff, the holder in due course. Part III will focus on the Code\u27s indirect treatment of the most troublesome parol evidence problems, those which arise when the holder is not in due course. Part IV will evaluate two examples of explicit statutory rules which prohibit parol evidence

Checking Some Wellesley Index Attributions by Empirical ‘Internal Evidence’: The Case of Blackie and Burton

Since its inception, the Wellesley Index has been a great resource for scholars wanting to know the identity of the numerous anonymous contributors to the nineteenth-century periodicals. However, when all the available external evidence was exhausted Wellesley attributors began to rely on internal evidence, and some of these attributions are now being queried as unduly speculative. This is the case with the attribution of certain articles in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine to John Stuart Blackie and John Hill Burton, two Scottish contributors in the 1830s and 40s, where the evidence is, as Eileen Curran noted in The Curran Index, often ‘tenuous.’  Developments in computational stylistics over the last thirty years now offer statistical techniques for testing such doubtful attributions. Use of the Burrows Method, based on an author’s relative usage or non-usage of common function words, allows the researcher to isolate an author’s distinctive stylistic traits and to use these to compare his known articles with others of more doubtful provenance and to make informed judgments about the likelihood of his authorship of these. These methods were used to test the authorship of eight articles attributed to Blackie and eight attributed to Burton. The use of function words in the doubtful articles was compared to that in six articles reliably attributed to Blackie and ten reliably attributed to Burton and then to that by contemporaries also writing for other major periodicals. It was found that only four of the Blackie articles tested and two of those by Burton appear to have been correctly attributed in the Wellesley Index

3D printing in cardiology: A review of applications and roles for advanced cardiac imaging

With the rate of cardiovascular diseases in the U.S increasing throughout the years, there is a need for developing more advanced treatment plans that can be tailored to specific patients and scenarios. The development of 3D printing is rapidly gaining acceptance into clinical cardiology. In this review, key technologies used in 3D printing are briefly summarized, particularly, the use of artificial intelligence (AI), open-source tools like MeshLab and MeshMixer, and 3D printing techniques such as fused deposition molding (FDM) and polyjet are reviewed. The combination of 3D printing, multiple image integration, and augmented reality may greatly enhance data visualization during diagnosis, treatment planning, and surgical procedures for cardiology