Voldemort Tyrannos: Plato’s Tyrant in the Republic and the Wizarding World

In the Harry Potter novel series, by J. K. Rowling, the character of Lord Voldemort is the dictatorial ruler of the Death Eaters and aspiring despot of the entire wizarding community. As such, he serves as an apt subject for the application of Plato’s portrait of the tyrant in Republic IX. The process of applying Plato to Voldemort, however, leads to an apparent anomaly, the resolution of which requires that we move beyond the Republic to the account of beauty presented by Plato in the Symposium. In doing so, we shall find that while Plato can help us to understand Voldemort, Voldemort can also help us to attain a deeper understanding of Plato

Pragmatism and Meaning: Assessing the Message of Star Trek: The Original Series

The original Star Trek television series purported to depict a future in which such evils as sexism and racism do not exist, and intelligent beings from numerous planets live in a condition of peace and mutual benefit. As many scholars have observed, from a standpoint of contemporary theoretical analysis, Star Trek: The Original Series contains many elements that are inimical to the utopia it claims to depict and thus undermine its supposed message. A different perspective may be gained by drawing on the American pragmatist movement, in which the value of an idea is judged by its effectiveness, how it ‘cashes out’ in terms of its impact in real life. Thus, the meaning and value of Star Trek: TOS can be assessed by observing its effects on its audience. This perspective coordinates well with Taylor’s discussion of the necessary conditions for the realization of a protreptic moral order in the social imaginary, as well as a pragmatist understanding of audience engagement and education

Ejectives in Scottish English: a social perspective

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the realization of word-final /k/ in a sample of read and casual speech by 28 female pupils from a single-sex Glaswegian high school. Girls differed in age, socioeconomic background, and ethnicity. Ejectives were the most usual variant for /k/ in both speech styles, occurring in the speech of every pupil in our sample. Our narrow auditory analysis revealed a continuum of ejective production, from weak to intense stops. Results from multinomial logistic regression show that ejective production is promoted by phonetic, linguistic and interactional factors: ejectives were used more in read speech, when /k/ occurred in the /-ŋk/ cluster (e.g. tank), and when the relevant word was either at the end of a clause or sentence, or in turn-final position. At the same time, significant interactions between style, and position in turn, and the social factors of age and ethnicity, show that the use of ejectives by these girls is subject to a fine degree of sociolinguistic control, alongside interactional factors. Finally, cautious comparison of these data with recordings made in 1997 suggests that these results may also reflect a sound change in progress, given the very substantial real-time increase in ejective realizations of /k/ in Glasgow over the past fourteen years

Sortition, Rotation and Mandate: Conditions for Political Equality and Deliberative Reasoning

The proposal to create a chamber selected by sortition would extend this democratic procedure into the legislative branch of government. However, there are good reasons to believe that, as currently conceived by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright, the proposal will fail to realize sufficiently two fundamental democratic goods, namely, political equality and deliberative reasoning. It is argued through analysis of its historic and contemporary application that sortition must be combined with other institutional devices, in particular, rotation of membership and limited mandate, in order to be democratically effective and to realize political equality and deliberative reasoning. An alternative proposal for a responsive sortition legislature is presented as more realistic and utopian: one that increases substantially the number of members, makes more extensive use of internal sortition and rotation, and recognizes the importance of establishing limited mandates

The Determination of the Operating Characteristics of a Newspaper Camera Department by Using Queueing Analysis

The methods of operation of many newspaper camera departments have been established over a long period by many different supervisors and department heads. The system may have been good once but went bad because the nature of the department\u27s operations changed without corresponding changes in the system. The production manager must be able to detect when a system needs modifying. Presently, there are few tools available to the manager for evaluating the effectiveness of the department. The goal of this study was to demonstrate how a very simple analytical technique could be applied to a camera department\u27s operations and, thereby, determine the department\u27s operating characteristics. This analytical technique is called queueing analysis. The particular camera department studied contained two independent systems. One camera serviced pasted-up pages while the other serviced halftones and artwork. Each of these systems or channels was studied separately. However, before the systems could be studied, several assumptions of the queueing model had to be satisfied. These assumptions were: (1) copy arrivals must be Poisson distributed, (2) copy service time must be exponentially distributed, (3) copy can not leave the waiting line after having entered, (4) the service discipline must be first-in-first-out, (5) and the arrival pattern must be random. The only raw data required by the analysis were the copy arrival time and the service time of each piece of copy. The data were compiled to form empirical distributions which were compared to theoretical distributions to determine the feasibility of the assumptions. The average arrival rate and service rate were also determined from this compiled data. These two averages were substituted into formulas developed by theorists to determine the operating characteristics or measures of effectiveness for the camera department. The analysis was carried out over a two week period and considered each system on a weekly basis. In this manner the two weeks of operation could be compared. It was found that the page channel could be monitored quite easily using queueing analysis, but the halftone/artwork camera could not be studied without modifications. It was found that the expected time a page spent in the system was much longer than previously thought. During the first week of observation, the expected time in the system was 18.9 minutes per page. It was 11.4 minutes per page during the second week. There was also a great difference between the two times which might indicate that something in the system had changed. It was found that the expected number of pages in the system per half hour during the first week was 1.69 and 1.06 during the second week. It would be expected that the system could handle a greater number of pages than this. This observation was further supported by the weekly busy period probabilities determined for the system. This is the probability that the system will be busy during any half hour interval during the week. The busy period probability was .63 for the first week and .51 for the second. These figures indicated that there was a great deal of idle time in this system. In fact, there was 23 hours and 19 minutes of idle time during the first week and 30 hours and 52 minutes during the second week. It was impossible to draw any straightforward conclusions from these results without knowing the objectives of the organization. If management\u27s goal was to minimize costs in this department, it was evident this objective was not being met in light of the great amount of idle time that existed. To realize this goal, management must reduce this idle time. If management\u27s goal was to maximize speed, the system would again be out of line with management\u27s expectations. However, this goal may have been more closely realized. To fully satisfy this objective would require management to reduce the time copy spends in the system. This study demonstrates that queueing analysis can be used quite successfully and easily in determining the operating characteristics of a camera department. It was also demonstrated that even when the analysis was not successful, much could be learned about the system through the application of this tool

Species, Distribution, and Host Records of the Braconid Genera Microctonus and Perilitus (Hymenoptera: Braconidae)

Author Institution: Department of Zoology and Entomology, The Ohio State University, Columbus 1

A Study of the Tenebrionidae of Southeastern Iowa

In his study of the Iowa Tenebrionidae the writer has classified specimens collected throughout the state both by students of Iowa Wesleyan College and by himself. These specimens are in the collection of Iowa Wesleyan College