Argument, Determing Factor in Trade Negotiations

The paper presents pragmatic guidance on current trends, the argument is a set of techniques that highlight the benefits they offer is a negotiator for the needs of others. The study focuses on rational arguments, by evidence and demonstration and practice of negotiations develop, characterized by a constant interaction of the elements which contribute to the possibilities offered to both partners. It stresses that the success of negotiations is determined by the negotiator's ability to define the steps, strategies, plan and ways of reasoning argument. Given that negotiations can occur during many different points of view, the paper presents techniques of counter-arguments and factors that may influence the success during the argument. The study highlights the fact that a negotiator can control the power dynamics of a negotiation of power through the use of traditional elements such as control of resources, time or information.trade negotiations, control resources.

Electrochemical durability of magnetite and birnessite modified electrodes with potential application in water splitting

Graphite electrodes were modified with compositions containing either Fe3O4 or δ-MnO2, and their electrochemical durability was investigated using the cyclic voltammetry method. Experimental results indicate that the most stable electrode is the one modified with the composition containing magnetite and Vulcan carbon, when exposed to electrochemical potentials in the anodic domain. Given this result and the potential values at which oxygen is evolved on the electrode, it has the prospect to find application in the water splitting domain

Double-layer capacitance study of a nickel phosphite/prophryn-modified graphite electrode with watersplitting catalytic properties

An electrode exhibiting water-splitting catalytic properties was manufactured by applying a combination between Ni11(HPO3)8(OH)6 and 5,10,15,20-tetrakis(4-methoxyphenyl)porphyrin on graphite substrate. The specimen was coded GNiPh-TMeOPP and its double-layer capacitance was investigated. The obtained value of 7.475 mF/cm2 is higher than the ones determined for the unmodified graphite support and for the nickel phosphite-based graphite electrode. This result indicates that GNiPh-TMeOPP is the most likely to find application in the field of supercapacitors

Exploring Strange, New Worlds: Travellers and Foreigners in Medieval Iberian Literature

This dissertation examines written travel accounts produced by Castilian and Andalusi authors and voyagers from twelfth- to fifteenth-century Iberia. The guiding research questions revolve around how journeyers encountered, reacted to, and reported on foreign peoples, lands, and customs as they left behind their homes and travelled throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia. From their liminal position as persons displaced from their home societies and separated from the ideology and social relations of their native lands, travellers offer a new perspective on a web of connections that permeated a dynamic, responsive, and interconnected medieval world. Chapter One examines the travel accounts of two Andalusi voyagers, Abu Hamid al-Gharnati, a Muslim scholar, and Ibn Jubayr, a pilgrim to Mecca. Looking particularly at religious questions, I read their travel diaries against a backdrop of supposed cultural and religious ethnocentrism and find that while both men hold on to their Muslim faith as a tie to their home worlds, each exhibits cultural awareness and curiosity and participates in a more complicated and diverse world than the one he left behind. Chapter Two is a study of the essential travel components of two popular works of Castilian fiction, the Libro de Alexandre (from before 1250) and the Libro del Caballero Zifar (c. 1300). I focus in particular on the positive representation of the foreign and how these works might reflect back upon the authors\u27 home societies. These two ideas--the positive representation of the unfamiliar and the veiled commentary on the authors\u27 native lands--are main themes in Chapter Three. This chapter treats two works of imaginary travels, the Libro del conosçimiento (c. 1390) and the Libro del Infante don Pedro de Portugal (in circulation by c. 1470). I examine the manner in which the authors utilize the foreign as a way to comment upon problems within their own communities. By setting up foreigners as models of inspiration, the writers were able to advocate for Christian unity and improved moral behavior by admonishing and encouraging their Christian readers without criticizing them outright. Two early-fourteenth-century Castilian travellers are the subject of Chapter Four. Ruy González de Clavijo, an ambassador of Enrique III to the Mongol-Turkic suzerain Timur in Samarkand, and the Cordoban knight Pero Tafur befriend foreign rulers and social inferiors, exchange gifts, and willingly participate in customs alien to their own culture and religion. Praising foreign societies for their wealth, power, and sophistication, Clavijo and Tafur portray themselves as special friends of important foreigners, thus positioning themselves as men specially suited to strengthen the bonds between Castile and alien civilizations in Europe, Africa, and Asia. From the variety of reasons for and manners in which these men journeyed abroad, I conclude that travel is a unique act that has the ability to modify the voyager\u27s perceptions of the unfamiliar and the foreign. By re-focusing the study of travel literature on the points of contact between the traveller and the foreigner, I attempt in this dissertation to highlight the ways in which medieval Iberian voyagers approached the unfamiliar with more open-mindedness and curiosity than might be expected given the social and historical contexts from which they departed

Senses of the Past: The Old English Vocabulary of History

How did the Anglo-Saxons think about history? Following a new path in an attempt to answer this question, this study examines individual Old English words translatable as 'history' and used in verse and prose texts and in glosses, and explores the mental conceptualizations they reveal. The approach offers a novel perspective on the complex and sophisticated attitudes of Anglo-Saxon cultural communities towards history and towards the dialectic between the preservation and re-enactment of the past. Inspired by cognitive linguistics, this lexicographical and semantic analysis argues that, in spite of this variety of ideas, the basic conceptualizations of history are essentially the same across the boundaries of genre, culture, and literacy/orality

The Resurrection of the Radical Political Movements

In the last decade the radical political movements became a important threat to European democracies in the conditions of decline on popularity of main political ideological parties all across the Europe. Especially nationalist radical movements seems to became more popular between the citizens after they took from the populist parties the Euroskeptical message and the radical message against minorities or immigrants. The extremist message of those parties or radical movements it's pretty much the same even they are located in different counties or cultures. The radical message of Golden Dawn in Greece - an Christian Orthodox culture - is similar with the Magyar Hajnal (Hungarian Dawns) in Hungary - a Catholic and Protestant culture - or Progress Party from Norway - a more secular culture than religious based.Our paper is focused on the origins of those parties in Europe and their radical message against immigrants or social/ethnic minorities. We argue that such parties succeed over the long term only when they both 1) build on pre-existing nationalist organizations and networks and 2) face a permissive rather than repressive political environment. Those parties develop themsleves on the fertile ground of far right wing populism and assume a very narrow to the fascist discourse of the beginings of the XXth century in order to contest the economical and democratic order. By adding factors such as historical legacies, party organization, and interactions between mainstream parties and far right challengers to the study of radical right parties, we can better understand their divergent trajectories

Spectres of ambiguity in divergent thinking and perceptual switching

Divergent thinking as a creative ability and perceptual switching between different interpretations of an unchanging stimulus (known as perceptual multistability) are thought to rely on similar processes. In the current study, we investigate to what extent task instructions and inherent stimulus characteristics influence participants' responses. In the first experiment, participants were asked to give as many interpretations for six images as possible. In the second experiment, participants reported which of two possible interpretations they saw at any moment for the same line drawings. From these two experiments, we extracted measures that allow us direct comparison between tasks. Results show that instructions have a large influence over the perception of images traditionally used in two different paradigms and that these images can be perceived in appropriate ways for both tasks. In addition, we suggest that the connection between the two phenomena can be explored interchangeably through three experimental manipulations: a) using a common set of images across both experiments, b) giving different task instructions for the two tasks, and c) extracting comparable metrics from both experimental paradigms