The Limits of an Egalitarian Ethos: G. A. Cohen's Critique of Rawlsian Liberalism

G.A. Cohen’s critique of the Rawlsian difference principle points out an inconsistency in its presentation. The initial equality decided by the participants in the original position under the veil of ignorance is not preserved by the inequality sanctioned by the difference principle. Cohen shows how the breakdown of the initial equality of the original position prevents the desired results of the Rawlsian system from being realized. Cohen argues that an egalitarian ethos is required within a society for equality preserving economic distributions and Pareto superior outcomes to occur. Nonetheless, Cohen’s analysis of Rawls misses the ultimate cause of inequality, which is the dynamics of capital accumulation. An egalitarian ethos is only possible if there is a socialist mode of production to facilitate its development. Additionally, Cohen’s critique of Rawlsian constructivism through an argument for intuitionism does not address the natural-material existence of human beings. This existence must be considered for any advantageous social formation

Moral Objectivity and Property: The Justice of Liberal Socialism

Abstract: This paper restates the thesis of 'The Requirements of Justice and Liberal Socialism" where it was argued that liberal socialism best meets Rawlsian requirements of justice. The recent responses to this paper by Jan Narveson, Jeppe von Platz, and Alan Thomas merit examination and comment. This paper shows that if Rawlsian justice is to be met, then non-personal property must be subject to public control. If just outcomes merit the public control of non-personal property and this control is not utilized, then justice has been subordinated to the objectively less important institution of private property

Evaluation of human-like anthropomorphism in the context of online bidding and affordances

This paper presents a four condition experiment and the results concerning the wider area of investigating the effectiveness and user satisfaction of using anthropomorphic feedback at the user interface. The specific context used was online bidding. The four conditions used in the experiment were human video, human voice, human voice with anthropomorphic text and a control consisting of neutral text. The main results of the experiment showed significant differences in participants' perceptions regarding the 'humanity' of the feedback they used. As expected, the control condition consisting of neutral text incurred significantly lower ratings for the 'humanity' characteristics of the feedback. The human video condition also incurred significantly stronger perceptions regarding the appearance being human. The results were also analysed in light of the theory of affordances and the authors conclude that the four conditions used in the experiment were likely equivalent in their facilitating the affordances. Therefore the authors suggest that facilitating the affordances may be more crucial to a user interface and the users than the actual anthropomorphic characteristic of the feedback used

Evaluation of anthropomorphic feedback for an online auction and affordances

This paper describes an experiment investigating the effectiveness and user satisfaction of using anthropomorphic feedback at the user interface. The context chosen was online bidding due to this kind of activity being very much used in current times by general users. The main results of the experiment were that there was a statistically significant effect observed for the time taken to place a bid in the anthropomorphic text condition. However there were no other significant effects for effectiveness issues and user satisfaction indicators. The results were also analysed in terms of the affordances and the main findings were that each of the four conditions tested in the experiment were probably equivalent in terms of their facilitating the affordances. Overall it may be more important to facilitate the affordances rather than a type of feedback being anthropomorphic in nature or not

Weak shock waves in the ionosphere

Weak shock waves in ionosphere and simple model of chemistry of ionospheric D laye

The Fundamental Interests of Citizens: A Response to Chung

Hun Chung’s recent article “Rawls’s Self-Defeat: A Formal Analysis” argues that the selection of results equivalent to justice as fairness can be derived by utilitarianism. Chung argues that these results can be achieved through the use of Rawls’s constructed utility function from his work Justice as Fairness. Although Chung’s article is finely argued and presented in great detail, this paper will show that Chung made three mistakes in the fundamentals of his argument. First, Chung mistakes Rawls’s constructed utility function as actually utilitarian. Second, Chung confuses the motivations and the assumptions of those held by agents in the original position and those held by utilitarian agents. Last, Chung’s previous mistakes result in the incorrect conclusion that an equal distribution of resources will be selected by representative agents instead of the unequal distribution prescribed by the difference principle

Job Reallocation, Unemployment and Hours in a New Keynesian Model

This paper focusses on the reallocation of labour resources in a New Keynesian environment with labour market search and endogenous separations. We show that introduction of variation in hours per worker alters the incentives for intertemporal substitution in a way that generates a more steeply downward sloping Beveridge curve and reduces the tendency to synchronise gross job flows. This also enables the New Keynesian model to capture the interaction of hours and employment at business cycle frequencies. We show that the impact of labour supply elasticity on the slope of the Beveridge curve and the correlation of gross job flows is determined primarily by variation in the response to monetary shocks. When hours variation is suppressed the comovement of job creation with job destruction and of unemployment with vacancies are strongly positive in response to monetary shocks. Whereas with variation in hours both measures of reallocation take on the correct negative sign. We also note that frictions in price adjustment make it possible to account a large part of the variation in unemployment observed in US data, despite the absence of wage rigidity or departures from the Hosios condition which have been proposed to resolve the unemployment variability puzzle identified by Shimer (2005).

Evaluation of an anthropomorphic user interface in a travel reservation context and affordances

This paper describes an experiment and its results concerning research that has been going on for a number ofyears in the area of anthropomorphic user interface feedback. The main aims of the research have been to examine theeffectiveness and user satisfaction of anthropomorphic feedback in various domains. The results are of use to all interactivesystems designers, particularly when dealing with issues of user interface feedback design. There is currently somedisagreement amongst computer scientists concerning the suitability of such types of feedback. This research is working toresolve this disagreement. The experiment detailed, concerns the specific software domain of Online Factual Delivery in thespecific context of online hotel bookings. Anthropomorphic feedback was compared against an equivalent non-anthropomorphicfeedback. Statistically significant results were obtained suggesting that the non-anthropomorphic feedback was more effective.The results for user satisfaction were however less clear. The results obtained are compared with previous research. Thissuggests that the observed results could be due to the issue of differing domains yielding different results. However the resultsmay also be due to the affordances at the interface being more facilitated in the non-anthropomorphic feedback

Automatic facial expression tracking for 4D range scans

This paper presents a fully automatic approach of spatio-temporal facial expression tracking for 4D range scans without any manual interventions (such as specifying landmarks). The approach consists of three steps: rigid registration, facial model reconstruction, and facial expression tracking. A Scaling Iterative Closest Points (SICP) algorithm is introduced to compute the optimal rigid registration between a template facial model and a range scan with consideration of the scale problem. A deformable model, physically based on thin shells, is proposed to faithfully reconstruct the facial surface and texture from that range data. And then the reconstructed facial model is used to track facial expressions presented in a sequence of range scans by the deformable model