8,312 research outputs found
A Question of Timing
US labour law violates ILO standards not at the margins, but at the core
Interactive rhythms across species: The evolutionary biology of animal chorusing and turn-taking
The study of human language is progressively moving toward comparative and interactive frameworks, extending the concept of turnâtaking to animal communication. While such an endeavor will help us understand the interactive origins of language, any theoretical account for crossâspecies turnâtaking should consider three key points. First, animal turnâtaking must incorporate biological studies on animal chorusing, namely how different species coordinate their signals over time. Second, while concepts employed in human communication and turnâtaking, such as intentionality, are still debated in animal behavior, lower level mechanisms with clear neurobiological bases can explain much of animal interactive behavior. Third, social behavior, interactivity, and cooperation can be orthogonal, and the alternation of animal signals need not be cooperative. Considering turnâtaking a subset of chorusing in the rhythmic dimension may avoid overinterpretation and enhance the comparability of future empirical work
If Supply-Oriented Drug Policy is Broken, Can Harm Reduction Help Fix It?âMelding Disciplines and Methods to Advance International Drug Control Policy
Critics of the international drug control regime contend that supply-oriented policy interventions are not just ineffective, but they also produce unintended adverse consequences. Research suggests their claims have merit. Lasting local reductions in opium production are possible, albeit rare; but, unless global demand shrinks, production will shift elsewhere, with little or no effect on the aggregate supply of heroin and, potentially, at some expense to exiting and newly emerging suppliers. The net consequences of the international drug control regime and related national policies are as yet unknown. In this paper, we consider whether âharm reduction,â a subject of intense debate in the demand-oriented drug policy community, can provide a unifying foundation for supply-oriented drug policy, one capable of speaking more directly to policy goals. Despite substantial conceptual and technical challenges, we find that harm reduction can provide a basis for assessing the net consequences of supply-oriented drug policy, choosing more rigorously among policy options, and identifying new policy options. In addition, we outline a practical path forward for assessing harms and policy options.
Competing Explanations of U.S. Defense Industry Consolidation in the 1990s and Their Policy Implications
Was the consolidation of defense industry in the 1990s driven by U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) directives, or was it driven instead by the same forces that drove consolidation in many other sectors of the U.S. economy in the 1990s? To better understand the roles of DOD policy and economy-wide forces in shaping the U.S. defense industry, we test for structural breaks in defense industry and spending data and compare our findings to those relating to other sectors and the general economy. We identify structural breaks in the defense-related data in the early 1980s and throughout the 1990s, roughly consistent with changes in the U.S. economy, including broader merger trends. Overall, our results are more consistent with the view that economy-wide factors drove defense industry consolidation, largely independent of the DOD policy changes that occurred early in the 1990s.
Formal Techniques and Self/Other Relations in the Novels of Dirk Bogarde
The thesis foregrounds the distinctive contribution Dirk Bogarde made to
contemporary writing in a second career that developed in parallel to his screen
commitments. It dispels the notion that Bogarde followed a familiar path as an actor
who wrote books. Instead it establishes his reputation as an innovative writer whose
formal technique was substantially influenced by the textual systems of cinema and
the cross-fertilisation from acting to writing.
In examining the formative factors that steered Bogarde towards authorship, the
thesis addresses the role of performance as a generative factor in the evolution of the
novels, establishing a discursive link with Bakhtinian dialogism, and specifically,
transgredience as a formal imperative. Secondly, it affords a critical insight into why
the major concerns with staging and performativity preoccupy his writing career.
The thesis claims that Bogarde was an empirically dialogical writer whose use
of camera-eye narration fostered the proliferation of competing discourses across the
fiction. This formal dynamic is centred on the relationship between stages and
dialogism, which incorporates the work of Erving Goffinan as a complementary
critique to Bakhtinian theory with its emphasis on self-presentation. The concern
with socially-constructed behaviour leads the thesis to address the associated issues of
stereotyping and 'otherness', which in terms of body politics is articulated by the
mono logic drive to confine the sexual 'other' to a fixed representation.
Bogarde's ability to draw on cinematic and performance techniques identifies
an area of expertise unavailable to most other writers. This is an unusual repository
of skills to bring to writing which is why the thesis makes the claim for his singular
achievement as a contemporary author. There are fruitful points of intersection to be
explored in this respect with the work of Christopher Isherwood, whom Bogarde read
and admired, as a basis for further research. It is hoped that the thesis will play its
part in opening up new possibilities for Bogarde's writing to be re-visited by future
critics
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