‘That’s unscientific!’: Science as the arbitrator of ‘truth’ in (German) feminist linguistic debates

The feminist critique of language has been contested from its very inception. Opponents have distanced themselves from feminist proposals by arguing, for example, that language and reality are separate entities; that linguistic disparity is insignificant in comparison to other forms of discrimination; and most of all, that feminist approaches are ‘unscientific’. In this paper, I explore the late 1970s dispute between Senta Trömel-Plötz, Hartwig Kalverkämper and Luise F. Pusch as a particular example of the feminist vs. ‘scientific’ position. These three linguists are prominent voices in the German-language context and their arguments provide a valuable insight into the nature of gender and language debates in general. As I aim to show in the following, even empirical evidence does not necessarily bring a close to the discussions

Inclusive design and making in practice: Bringing bodily experience into closer contact with making

This paper develops our understanding of the nature of inclusive design, first through critique of controversies that to some degree downplay inclusive design as a distinct design movement. Attentive of these criticisms we then observe designer-making practices in two cases, which respect individual difference and encourage a more material mode of participation. By bringing the bodily experience of people with (dis)abilities more closely into their own design processes we see positive characteristics and advantage in inclusive design’s closer connections with making. This research advocates the expansion of inclusive design into a more material, inclusive designer-making movement, to acknowledge the universal problem of designing for everyone’s unique difference

Parrondo games as disordered systems

Parrondo's paradox refers to the counter-intuitive situation where a winning strategy results from a suitable combination of losing ones. Simple stochastic games exhibiting this paradox have been introduced around the turn of the millennium. The common setting of these Parrondo games is that two rules, $A$ and $B$, are played at discrete time steps, following either a periodic pattern or an aperiodic one, be it deterministic or random. These games can be mapped onto 1D random walks. In capital-dependent games, the probabilities of moving right or left depend on the walker's position modulo some integer $K$. In history-dependent games, each step is correlated with the $Q$ previous ones. In both cases the gain identifies with the velocity of the walker's ballistic motion, which depends non-linearly on model parameters, allowing for the possibility of Parrondo's paradox. Calculating the gain involves products of non-commuting Markov matrices, which are somehow analogous to the transfer matrices used in the physics of 1D disordered systems. Elaborating upon this analogy, we study a paradigmatic Parrondo game of each class in the neutral situation where each rule, when played alone, is fair. The main emphasis of this systematic approach is on the dependence of the gain on the remaining parameters and, above all, on the game, i.e., the rule pattern, be it periodic or aperiodic, deterministic or random. One of the most original sides of this work is the identification of weak-contrast regimes for capital-dependent and history-dependent Parrondo games, and a detailed quantitative investigation of the gain in the latter scaling regimes.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, 2 table

An investigation of equilibration in small quantum systems: the example of a particle in a 1D random potential

We investigate the equilibration of a small isolated quantum system by means of its matrix of asymptotic transition probabilities in a preferential basis. The trace of this matrix is shown to measure the degree of equilibration of the system launched from a typical state, from the standpoint of the chosen basis. This approach is substantiated by an in-depth study of the example of a tight-binding particle in one dimension. In the regime of free ballistic propagation, the above trace saturates to a finite limit, testifying good equilibration. In the presence of a random potential, the trace grows linearly with the system size, testifying poor equilibration in the insulating regime induced by Anderson localization. In the weak-disorder situation of most interest, a universal finite-size scaling law describes the crossover between the ballistic and localized regimes. The associated crossover exponent 2/3 is dictated by the anomalous band-edge scaling characterizing the most localized energy eigenstates.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl