London 2012 and the impact of the UK’s Olympic and Paralympic legislation: protecting commerce or preserving culture?

The general commercial rights associated with the Olympic Movement are protected in the UK by the Olympic Symbols etc (Protection) Act 1995. In addition, the UK Government, in response to a requirement of the Host City Contract with the International Olympic Committee, created the London Olympic Association Right under section 33 and Schedule 4 of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games Act 2006. These provisions enable the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games to exploit, to the fullest extent, the commercial rights associated with the London Olympic Games. This article questions whether the IOC’s requirement for legislative protection and state enforcement of the commercial rights are compatible with the Fundamental Principles of Olympism as defined in the Olympic Charter, and its stated aim of being a celebration of sporting endeavour, culture and education

On the Difference Between Being and Object

If philosophy in the wake of Kant’s transcendental revolution tends to orient itself around a subjective principle, namely the human subject, then recently various schools of thought have proposed a counter-revolution in which philosophy is given an objective, non-human starting point. In this historical context, ‘object-oriented ontology’ has sought to gain the status of first philosophy by identifying being in general with the object as such—that is, by systematically converting beings to objects. By tracing the provenance of contemporary object-oriented philosophy to a key moment of late 18th-century German philosophy, this paper develops the idea of the difference between being and object in order to demonstrate that object-oriented thinking, contrary to its anti-Kantian claims, adheres to the central axiom of transcendental idealism, that this axiom is an unsolvable paradox, and that Kant and Novalis give us the resources for a transformative philosophical project that meets the challenge of the cultural and theoretical turn to objects

Consuming the Olympics: the fan, the rights holder and the law

The London Olympic Games and Paralympics Act 2006 (the Act) received its Royal Assent on 30 March 2006, well over six years before the Games themselves are due to begin. The early passing of this Act is partly to ensure that the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) has sufficient time to organise the Games, and partly to ensure that Parliament has sufficient legislative time to implement the legal framework necessary to stage a modern Games to the satisfaction of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The Act as a whole covers a variety of issues from the creation of the ODA and the defining of its role and powers in respect of planning and transport to the creation of several new criminal offences. Within the Act are certain key areas worthy of socio-legal investigation. Indeed, many of the provisions are emblematic of how the law maps the cultural and commercial tensions that we have identified elsewhere (James and Osborn, 2009 and Greenfield and Osborn, 2001). These tensions are particularly pronounced with respect to an event such as the Olympics, where the historically entrenched cultural values and identity of the Olympic movement must now be read alongside the commercial imperative of maximising income (Tomlinson, 2005)

ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF AN EXHAUSTIBLE IRRIGATION WATER SUPPLY: TEXAS HIGH PLAINS

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Eigenvalue correlations in QCD with a chemical potential

We discuss a new Random Matrix Model for QCD with a chemical potential that is based on the symmetries of the Dirac operator and can be solved exactly for all eigenvalue correlations for any number of flavors. In the microscopic limit of small energy levels the results should be an accurate description of QCD. This new model can also be scaled so that all physical observables remain at their $\mu=0$ values until a first order chiral restoration transition is reached. This gives a more realistic model for the QCD phase diagram than previous RMM. We also mention how the model might aid in determining the phase diagram of QCD from future numerical simulations.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, Lattice2004(non-zero