Modernization's Doppelgänger

Modernization theory has rightly become a central topic of twentieth-century US intellectual history. Not only does it represent a key movement in modern economics, but modernization theory's purposeful interdisciplinarity ropes in psychology, sociology and political science (at least), and makes it stand as one of the main pillars of the new interdiscipline of behavioral science that was so influential in the postwar Western academy. As an equally purposeful policy science, modernization theory also played an important role in a raft of postwar political initiatives—in the Cold War, in international economic development, in the organization of science, in counterinsurgency and the Vietnam War. This unusually fruitful (albeit often unusually destructive) intermeshing of ideas and politics has been neatly exemplified in the person of Walt Rostow, “America's Rasputin,” who parlayed a politically unpromising track record as an economic historian into a role as one of the principal strategists of the Vietnam War. Opinion differs as to how determinative modernization theory's ideas were; Bruce Kuklick has suggested of most social science in this period that it “served to legitimate but not to energize politics,” or, as a participant put it more trenchantly in 1949, “The administrator uses social science the way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than for illumination.” Still, most intellectual historians would be happy (though not necessarily proud) to think that their key concepts provided even support for the major political enterprises of their day.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S147924431500041

Good Reading for the Million: The ‘Paperback Revolution’ and the Co-Production of Academic Knowledge in Mid-20th Century Britain and America

The 'paperback revolution' among many other effects provided the principal means of diffusion of academic knowledge to mass audiences, not as is sometimes thought in the 1960s but as early as the 1930s in the UK and the 1940s in the US. Mass-market paperback publishers Penguin in the UK and New American Library in the US commissioned original work and reprinted many classic works to very large audiences through their Pelican and Mentor lines before the better-known 'quality' paperbacks. Important works of social science, history, religion, philosophy and the history of science reached their widest audience in this form, especially in the US through unorthodox outlets such as newsstands and variety stores. The mass-market publishers combined entrepeneurial, educational and democratic methods and motivations in ways that encouraged readers to make their own choices and then fed those choices back into new commissions, repackagings and reprintings, thus acting out the 'co-production' of knowledge that is much talked about but hard to document

Educating the Nation: IV. Subject Choice

This address tracks the choices made by students at English schools (O-Level, GCSE and A-Level) and at British universities (undergraduate degree) of what subjects to study over the whole of the period since the Second World War. There are marked long-term trends towards a greater diversity in subjects studied, especially at A-Level and degree level, and this tended to reduce over time the dominance of science, to the advantage of a range of subjects including social studies, traditional humanities and latterly creative arts. These trends reflect (most of all) the growing size and diversity of the student body staying on to further study, but also the broadening of the labour market which this more diverse body of students is entering, and social and cultural changes favouring creativity and self-expression in education. The address closes with a reflection on the possible significance of a very recent halting and even a reversal of these trends in subject choice, to the apparent benefit of the sciences

Learning object relationships which determine the outcome of actions

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Reasons and Means to Model Preferences as Incomplete

Literature involving preferences of artificial agents or human beings often assume their preferences can be represented using a complete transitive binary relation. Much has been written however on different models of preferences. We review some of the reasons that have been put forward to justify more complex modeling, and review some of the techniques that have been proposed to obtain models of such preferences

Quantitative localized proton-promoted dissolution kinetics of calcite using scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM)

Scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) has been used to determine quantitatively the kinetics of proton-promoted dissolution of the calcite (101̅4) cleavage surface (from natural “Iceland Spar”) at the microscopic scale. By working under conditions where the probe size is much less than the characteristic dislocation spacing (as revealed from etching), it has been possible to measure kinetics mainly in regions of the surface which are free from dislocations, for the first time. To clearly reveal the locations of measurements, studies focused on cleaved “mirror” surfaces, where one of the two faces produced by cleavage was etched freely to reveal defects intersecting the surface, while the other (mirror) face was etched locally (and quantitatively) using SECM to generate high proton fluxes with a 25 μm diameter Pt disk ultramicroelectrode (UME) positioned at a defined (known) distance from a crystal surface. The etch pits formed at various etch times were measured using white light interferometry to ascertain pit dimensions. To determine quantitative dissolution kinetics, a moving boundary finite element model was formulated in which experimental time-dependent pit expansion data formed the input for simulations, from which solution and interfacial concentrations of key chemical species, and interfacial fluxes, could then be determined and visualized. This novel analysis allowed the rate constant for proton attack on calcite, and the order of the reaction with respect to the interfacial proton concentration, to be determined unambiguously. The process was found to be first order in terms of interfacial proton concentration with a rate constant k = 6.3 (± 1.3) × 10–4 m s–1. Significantly, this value is similar to previous macroscopic rate measurements of calcite dissolution which averaged over large areas and many dislocation sites, and where such sites provided a continuous source of steps for dissolution. Since the local measurements reported herein are mainly made in regions without dislocations, this study demonstrates that dislocations and steps that arise from such sites are not needed for fast proton-promoted calcite dissolution. Other sites, such as point defects, which are naturally abundant in calcite, are likely to be key reaction sites

State dependent choice

We propose a theory of choices that are influenced by the psychological state of the agent. The central hypothesis is that the psychological state controls the urgency of the attributes sought by the decision maker in the available alternatives. While state dependent choice is less restricted than rational choice, our model does have empirical content, expressed by simple "revealed preference" type of constraints on observable choice data. We demonstrate the applicability of simple versions of the framework to economic contexts. We show in particular that it can explain widely researched anomalies in the labour supply of taxi drivers

Tensors and compositionality in neural systems

Neither neurobiological nor process models of meaning composition specify the operator through which constituent parts are bound together into compositional structures. In this paper, we argue that a neurophysiological computation system cannot achieve the compositionality exhibited in human thought and language if it were to rely on a multiplicative operator to perform binding, as the tensor product (TP)-based systems that have been widely adopted in cognitive science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence do. We show via simulation and two behavioural experiments that TPs violate variable-value independence, but human behaviour does not. Specifically, TPs fail to capture that in the statements fuzzy cactus and fuzzy penguin, both cactus and penguin are predicated by fuzzy(x) and belong to the set of fuzzy things, rendering these arguments similar to each other. Consistent with that thesis, people judged arguments that shared the same role to be similar, even when those arguments themselves (e.g., cacti and penguins) were judged to be dissimilar when in isolation. By contrast, the similarity of the TPs representing fuzzy(cactus) and fuzzy(penguin) was determined by the similarity of the arguments, which in this case approaches zero. Based on these results, we argue that neural systems that use TPs for binding cannot approximate how the human mind and brain represent compositional information during processing. We describe a contrasting binding mechanism that any physiological or artificial neural system could use to maintain independence between a role and its argument, a prerequisite for compositionality and, thus, for instantiating the expressive power of human thought and language in a neural system