An Horrible Usage

Your editor advises me that he does not consider it the purpose of Word Ways to serve as watchdog over the purity of the English language, but concedes that an occasional growl might do no harm.Let me attack, then, a practice that is widespread and in my view indefensible -- yet is perpetuated by many in the best position to serve as preceptors of good usage. I refer to using an before historical or historic

Sternotherus

Number of Pages: 2Integrative BiologyGeological Science

Content enrichment through dynamic annotation

This paper describes a technique for interceding between users and the information that they browse. This facility, that we term 'dynamic annotation', affords a means of editing Web page content 'on-the-fly' between the source Web server and the requesting client. Thereby, we have a generic way of modifying the content displayed to local users by addition, removal or reorganising any information sourced from the World-Wide Web, whether this derives from local or remote pages. For some time, we have been exploring the scope for this device and we believe that it affords many potential worthwhile applications. Here, we describe two varieties of use. The first variety focuses on support for individual users in two contexts (second-language support and second language learning). The second variety of use focuses on support for groups of users. These differing applications have a common goal which is content enrichment of the materials placed before the user. Dynamic annotation provides a potent and flexible means to this end

Editor\u27s Introduction (Review Symposium on \u3ci\u3eConverging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems\u3c/i\u3e)

[Excerpt] During the past two decades there have been significant changes in employment systems across industrialized countries. Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems, by Harry C. Katz and Owen Darbishire, examines changes since 1980 in employment practices in seven industrialized countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and Italy—with a focus on the automotive and telecommunications industries. Katz and Darbishire find that variations in employment patterns within these countries have been increasing over the past two decades. The increase in variation is not simply a result of a decline in union strength in some sectors of the economy; variation has increased within both union and nonunion sectors. Despite this within-country divergence, Katz and Darbishire find that employment systems across countries are converging toward four common patterns of work practices: a low-wage employment pattern; the human resource management (HRM) employment pattern; a Japanese-oriented employment pattern; and a joint team-based employment pattern. Significant differences in national employment-related institutions have resulted in some variation across countries in how these work patterns are implemented. Still, Katz and Darbishire find that there are many commonalities in the employment systems of the seven countries and in the processes through which these commonalities have developed

The Historical Background of the Communist Manifesto

[Excerpt] The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published 150 years ago in London in February 1848, is one of the most influential and widely-read documents of the past two centuries. The historian A. J. P. Taylor (1967, p. 7) has called it a holy book, and contends that because of it, everyone thinks differently about politics and society. And yet, despite its enormous influence in the 20th century, the Manifesto is very much a period piece, a document of what was called the hungry 1840s. It is hard to imagine it being written in any other decade of the 19th century. The critique of capitalism offered by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto is understandable in the context of economic conditions in Britain from 1837 to 1848, and it is not that different, in places, from the conclusions reached by other social critics during the 1840s. This paper attempts to place the Manifestos analysis of capitalist economic development in historical perspective. I begin by summarizing the economic arguments of Marx and Engels. While the Manifesto-was written by Marx, its economic analysis was strongly influenced by Engels\u27s practical experience of capitalism in his family\u27s cotton firm in Manchester, England, in 1842-44. Upon his return to Germany, Engels published in 1845 a scathing indictment of early industrial capitalism, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Much of Engels\u27s critique of British capitalism reappears in greatly condensed form in Section I of the Manifesto. The second part of the paper examines the economic, social, and political conditions in Manchester and the surrounding south Lancashire cotton towns in the 1830s and 1840s, drawing largely on the views of contemporary observers. I then look at recent research on the standard of living of the working class from 1820 to 1851, focusing on conditions in the Lancashire cotton industry during the hungry \u2740s. Finally, I examine economic conditions in England in the two or three decades after the Manifesto was published, and briefly discuss why Marx and Engels\u27s predictions for the imminent collapse of capitalism were so wide of the mark

[Review of the book \u3ci\u3eInterwar Unemployment in International Perspective\u3c/i\u3e]

[Excerpt] The book redresses two imbalances in the recent literature on interwar unemployment: its almost exclusive focus on the United States and Britain, and its predominantly macroeconomic nature. To achieve these goals, the editors encouraged the authors of the country studies to address a set of microeconomic issues, including the extent to which the incidence and duration of unemployment varied across economic and demographic groups, and the effect of unemployment on labor force participation and poverty. Two macroeconomic issues also are addressed in several of the papers: the effects of real wages and of unemployment insurance on unemployment. These two issues have been hotly debated in the recent literature on interwar unemployment in the United States and Britain, and their discussion here for other industrialized countries represents a significant addition to the current debate