Civil protective orders effective in stopping or reducing partner violence: challenges remain in rural areas with access and enforcement

Civil protective orders are a low cost, effective solution in either stopping or significantly reducing partner violence for women. While all women benefit from civil protective orders, this brief finds there are greater obstacles to enforcement in rural places, which result in less benefit for rural than urban women. The authors suggest that policies and services should be tailored to address community-specific barriers and differences such as hours of access, time it takes to obtain or serve an order, and access to information about the process

Review and précis of Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature: How mind emerged from matter

We review and summarize Terrence Deacon’s book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

The biological foundation of media ecology

Media ecology is shown to embrace not only the study of media but also the study of language, culture and technology and the interaction of these four domains. It is demonstrated that language, culture, technology and media behave like living organisms in that they are emergent phenomena and that they evolve, propagate their organization and interact with each other in a media ecosystem. This model allows us to explore the biological dimension of media ecology, which it is claimed has been hitherto ignored. It is shown that both biological and media ecosystems may be considered as media in themselves and that an ecosystem is both the medium and the message

Mcluhan, energy exploitation and the overextensions of man

We make use of McLuhan’s Laws of Media and his notion that our technologies are “the extensions of man” to understand ecological issues in general and global warming in particular. We examine the evolution of humankind’s exploitation of energy that have increased human wealth and well being. We identify the benefits and costs of tool making, the control of fire, agriculture, steam engines, internal combustion engines, electricity generation and nuclear power plants. Using McLuhan’s Laws of Media we show that an energy exploitation technology or medium, and hence an extension of man, when pushed to its extreme can flip into it opposite an ‘overextension of man.’ This is certainly the case with the environmental challenges facing our planet and the survival of the human race today. These include the storage of nuclear waste and the depletion of natural resources. It is the burning of fossil fuels giving rise to pollution and the greenhouse effect, which is most troubling as the build up of greenhouse gases could devolve into a runaway effect threatening the very existence of human habitation on this planet

A biological approach to the rhetoric of emergent media

Emergence theory and the rhetorical canons offer a novel approach and new insights into the evolution and function of new media and media in general. This analysis uses a biological approach to rhetoric and theories of emergence to explore how agents enter into and navigate within five different ecosystems—biology, news, religion, design, and media. The primary methodology is based on the five rhetorical canons—delivery, arrangement, memory, invention, and style—and three evolutionary terms—descent, modification, and selection. This original and progressive framework is successfully applied to the five ecosystems to better understand their evolution, function, and future. Searching for common strands in these ecosystems is the beginning of an ambitious inquiry into an “ecology of ecologies.

Feedforward, I. A. Richards, cybernetics and Marshall McLuhan

I. A. Richards’ development of feedforward is reviewed. The impact of feedforward on the work of Marshall McLuhan is then surveyed and shown to have influenced his use of figure/ground, the user as content, the content of a new medium is some older medium, the use of the probe, effects preceding cause, avoidance of a point of view and roles versus jobs