The unity of intellect and will: Vygotsky and Spinoza

Jerome Bruner points out in his prologue to the first volume of the English translation of The Collected Works that Vygotsky flirts with the idea that language creates free will. This paper attempts to consider the influence of the Dutch seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza on Vygotsky. An account of Spinoza's anti-Cartesian conception of will is given, to which Vygotsky recognises his indebtedness. We will consider elements of Spinoza’s philosophy that were important to Vygotsky’s theory of the development of intellect, and claim that an appreciation of the philosophy informing Vygotsky’s theory of the development of intellect is necessary if the full implications of his project are to be grasped

Export Performance and Competitiveness of the Irish Economy

This paper reviews Ireland’s recent export performance, with emphasis on the reasons behind the strong gains in market share experienced by the economy over the past 15 years.

The Impact of Oil Prices on Irish Inflation

Oil prices have been characterised by large fluctuations in recent years. Strong volatility in oil prices has important implications for the Irish economy as Ireland has a relatively poor fuel endowment and relies heavily on imported oil. Energy price increases have been one of the principal drivers behind HICP inflation rates in Ireland in recent years. This article highlights the distinctive features of the Irish energy market which render the impact of oil price changes on Irish inflation different to the average impact felt at the euro area level. The direct effects on inflation are stronger in Ireland than in the euro area, reflecting the higher dependence on both oil and gas. The pass-through of higher oil prices to petrol and diesel prices at the pumps is slower than the euro area average but there is no evidence of pricing asymmetries. Indirect effects appear to be of a similar order of magnitude to the euro area average. Given the Irish economy’s relatively high wage flexibility, and in particular the low incidence of automatic wage indexation, it is likely that second-round effects in Ireland are more contained than in the euro area. Irish pre-tax diesel and petrol prices are roughly comparable to euro area levels reflective of improved competition, whereas heating fuel is considerably more expensive. Pre-tax electricity and gas prices remain significantly above the euro area average and further steps are needed on the path to full liberalisation of the retail electricity and gas markets. Measures to reduce oil and gas dependency by, for example, greater recourse to renewable energy resources, will help mitigate the impact that oil price fluctuations have on Irish inflation.

Students Understanding of Music Pamphlets Meaning (In the students 6th semester of English Department UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung)

There are many kinds of communication; one of them is to influence someone to make changing his feeling behavior that is called as an advertisement. Advertisement is designed to generate increasing consumption of those products and services through the creation and reinvention of the “brand image”. This research investigated the students understanding about the music pamphlet meaning of advertisement. This research goal was aimed to answer the following research problem: 1.) what kinds of meaning are understood by 6th semester students of English Department music pamphlets meaning? 2.) What difficulties are encountered by 6th semester students of English Department understanding music pamphlets meaning? The result of this research was there were respondents who understood the meaning of music pamphlet in lexical and contextual meaning. They are R1 to R10 getting 5 point (very understand). All of them were able to answer all questionnaires with contextual meaning except: R2 and R4 they got 2 point (not understand). Beside, the research results showed some difficulties encountered by the respondents in understanding music pamphlets meaning. The first were respondents who had difficulties to answer questionnaire with lexical meaning. The second were respondents who had difficulties to answer questionnaire with contextual meaning. The third were respondents who had difficulties with vocabulary building in music pamphlet. The fourth were respondents who had difficulties with structure phrase or structure used in music pamphlet. The fifth were same respondents who had difficulties with element culture to understand music pamphlet in contextual meaning. In conclusion of research all of students are able to answer all questionnaires well with lexical meaning, then, all of students are quite able to understand when answering questionnaires with contextual meaning. Because level understanding of knowledge about the music pamphlet events is really important for students

Testing for Asymmetric Pricing Behaviour in Irish and UK Petrol and Diesel Markets

This paper empirically tests whether Irish and UK petrol and diesel markets are characterised by asymmetric pricing behaviour. The econometric assessment uses threshold autoregressive models and a dataset of monthly refined oil and retail prices covering the period 1997 to mid-2009. A methodological note is included on the importance of the specification of the number of possible regimes. In particular, the possibility of conflicting price pressures arising from short-run dynamics in retail prices and responses to disequilibrium errors needs to be explicitly modelled. For both the Irish and UK liquid fuel markets at national levels, the paper concludes that there is no evidence to support the “rockets and feathers” hypothesis that retail prices rise faster than they fall in response to changes in oil prices. It is still possible that a lack of competition at a more local level may accommodate asymmetric pricing behaviour.

Winter is here: summarizing Twitter streams related to pre-scheduled events

Pre-scheduled events, such as TV shows and sports games, usually garner considerable attention from the public. Twitter captures large volumes of discussions and messages related to these events, in real-time. Twitter streams related to pre-scheduled events are characterized by the following: (1) spikes in the volume of published tweets reflect the highlights of the event and (2) some of the published tweets make reference to the characters involved in the event, in the context in which they are currently portrayed in a subevent. In this paper, we take advantage of these characteristics to identify the highlights of pre-scheduled events from tweet streams and we demonstrate a method to summarize these highlights. We evaluate our algorithm on tweets collected around 2 episodes of a popular TV show, Game of Thrones, Season 7.Published versio

Now-casting Irish GDP

In this paper we present "now-casts" of Irish GDP using timely data from a panel data set of 41 different variables. The approach seeks to resolve two issues which commonly confront forecastors of GDP - how to parsimoniously avail of the many different series, which can potentially influence GDP and how to reconcile the within-quarterly release of many of these series with the quarterly estimates of GDP? The now-casts in this paper are generated by firstly, using dynamic factor analysis to extract a common factor from the panel data set and, secondly, through use of bridging equations to relate the monthly data to the quarterly GDP estimates. We conduct an out-of-sample forecasting simulation exercise, where the results of the now-casting exercise are compared with those of a standard benchmark model.

Developing Predictive Molecular Maps of Human Disease through Community-based Modeling

The failure of biology to identify the molecular causes of disease has led to disappointment in the rate of development of new medicines. By combining the power of community-based modeling with broad access to large datasets on a platform that promotes reproducible analyses we can work towards more predictive molecular maps that can deliver better therapeutics