Iced Out: How Immigration Enforcement Has Interfered with Workers’ Rights

[Excerpt] In recent years, however, our federal government’s approach to immigration enforcement has severely interfered with the protection of labor rights for immigrant workers. The single-minded focus on immigration enforcement without regard to violations of workplace laws has enabled employers with rampant labor and employment violations to profit by employing workers who are terrified to complain about substandard wages, unsafe conditions, and lack of benefits, or to demand their right to bargain collectively

Sense of agency and the role of entertainment in Infinite Jest’s “Living Dead”

This paper attempts to betoken the relevance of emotions in the representation of the body and in the 'reviving' of the self in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The novel discerns a world where the oversaturation of choices in entertainment has revered a tradition of ennui and addiction as part of the hedonistic search for pleasure. This is of a particular importance to the understanding of the destruction of the self which is consequently framed in the paradoxically position of the 'abject', as one who rejects the self over unreachable pleasure. On the basis of this new definition of entertainment, characters are annularly entrapped in non-agent actions to escape this deadly and stultifying entertainment (through sports, media and/or drugs). Moreover, entertainment invalidates its original meaning as it evokes no true stimuli in the characters in the novel. This significantly shows how individuals are unable to feel any emotion or attachment to the external world. As a consequence, their mind is prosthesized and has lost control over the body which thus suggestively explains why bodies in the novel are described as malleable, machine-like and deformed. This can be enlightened from a neuropsychologist perspective with the claim that emotions play a key role in representing the body. If one feels a detachment from the body and no 'sense of agency', one may state to feel non-existent or dead as no external stimuli evokes emotions in them. Cotard syndrome helps to reveal how the lack of emotions disables a correct representation of the body giving way to the belief that one may be dead, non-existent or deformed. The discussion will lay on how Infinite Jest is a novel, among other things, about the struggle to regain feeling and the lost self from a body perspective and its validating connection to the mind.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

For scientists, for students or for the public? : the shifting roles of natural history museums

This article aims to discuss the main roles of natural history museums and to show how these purposes have evolved and adapted throughout the museums’ history, as a response to the development of natural sciences and societal change, from their creation in the 18th century to the present. It strives to demonstrate how the balance between research, teaching and disseminating knowledge to the public has successively shifted, without ever forsaking any of these functions. It is focused on Portuguese museums, but examining their place within international trends

Fatores determinantes da eficiência do setor bancário em Portugal: uma aplicação através de modelos de regressão fracional

The participation in the Euro area and the current financial crisis substantially conditioned the development of the Portuguese banking industry, for which is expected a continuous fall in income and a growing competitive pressure, improving the need to look carefully to issues as efficiency as an essential survival factor. Efficiency indicators of the main banks operating in Portugal were measured through DEA methodology. The application of two-stage models allowed circumventing the usual problems inherent to the coexistence of the production and intermediation approaches. The application of regression for proportions, more appropriate than traditional linear and Tobit regressions, to deal with the fractional nature of the DEA scores, allowed the identification of efficiency determinant factors for the main banks operating in Portugal. The fractional regression models demonstrate evidence of improved specification comparing to traditional regression models. The variables that appear to major influence on overall efficiency are internationalization, size and type of ownership of capital.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio