Advise You Research Articles

A Global Trend: Privatization and Reform of Social Security Pension Plans

Ten years ago Chile successfully privatized its social security system, beginning a worldwide trend to solve the problem of an increasing burden on government-supported social security programs. Contributing factors include an aging population, fewer workers to support retirees, government budget deficits and the influence of politics.

Small, Medium or Large: Why Is Size so Important?

As with the other two segments, Wings Over the Pond, the second in the series, is generally free of terminology. This tape presents a rather generous portion of flying dragonffies and damselflies. Featured are differences between these two types of insects, especially in wing positions. Differences between frogs and toads are also presented but are less precise. The last tape, A Tiger in the Pond, describes in an abbreviated fashion the life cycles of two water insects. Two methods of acquiring oxygen are presented along with the methods a predatory insect employs in capturing and eating prey. Attempts are close-up focusing and the dissemination of misinformation, such as describing the Water Boatman and Backswimmer as the same insect, are unfortunate distractions. The symphonic music score, although brief, also seems incongruous for the level of audience and subject matter. I advise you to take time for a preview before buying this series.

Of Card Tricks and Charismatic Leaders

When teaching introductory sociology classes, I try often to employ teaching devices which stimulate the attention of the class without sacrificing the point I am trying to make. Using such devices, however, presents a difficulty: it is very easy to slide from the role of instructor to that of entertainer, particularly in a large lecture hall crammed with students who respond well to humor and light, off-the-cuff remarks. The following lecture shows such a class how cult leaders can manipulate their followers without the followers ever becoming aware of what is being done to them. In preparing it, I tried to capture some of the entertainer's enthusiasm without sacrificing lecture content. If you like the looks of this lecture, I advise you to practice each step carefully before attempting it in your classroom.

The Medical Artists' Association: a backward glance, a forward look.

Dispel from your mind the thought that an understanding of the human body in every aspect of its structure can be given in words; the more thoroughly you describe — the more thoroughly you will confuse — it is necessary to draw as well as describe. I advise you not to trouble with words unless you are speaking to blind men.'

“Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch”: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry

I WOULD ADVISE YOU when You do fight Not to act like Tygers and Bears as these Virginians do-Biting one anothers Lips and Noses off, and gowging one anotherthat is, thrusting out one anothers Eyes, and kicking one another on the Cods, to the Great damage of many a Poor Woman.' Thus, Charles Woodmason, an itinerant Anglican minister born of English gentry stock, described the brutal form of combat he found in the Virginia backcountry shortly before the American Revolution. Although historians are more likely to study people thinking, governing, worshiping, or working, how men fight-who participates, who observes, which rules are followed, what is at stake, what tactics are allowed-reveals much about past cultures and societies. The evolution of southern backwoods brawling from the late eighteenth century through the antebellum era can be reconstructed from oral traditions and travelers' accounts. As in most cultural history, broad patterns and uneven trends rather than specific dates mark the way. The sources are often problematic and must be used with care; some speculation is required. But the lives of common people cannot be ignored merely because they leave few records. To feel for a feller's eyestrings and make him tell the news was not just mayhem but an act freighted with significance for both social and cultural history.2

The British Way

ONE HAS TO BE CAREFUL ON THESE OCCASIONS. THERE IS SO much accident about it. Personally, as a latedeveloper at school, I did not have matriculation Latin but if I had I would have read History at Oxford. Instead I began in Economics at London University, at University College, by the way, not LSE – I had not heard of either, but LSE looked like the office blocks of Croydon in which my father worked in insurance and UCL looked like a university, as I had seen them in the cinema. But I moved out of Economics when my tutor at the beginning of the third year gave me a very high mark on an essay on ‘Value Theory’, but said: ‘Get out. I advise you to get out. You plainly don't believe in the subject. You will be a brilliant critic of it if you go on. But you don't believe that economic theory is an thing else but an analytical card-castle. If you go on, youdend up by hating your subject, hating yourself, and feeling like I do that you've wasted your life.’ I said that as I was taking Finals that summer, it was a little late to switch. ‘Nonsense’, Alfred Stonier replied, ‘not if you really want to get out of Economics. You are going dong to LSE for Laski's lectures for subsidiary. Government's easy, just reading books. Switch to that till you're clear what to do.’

The Concept of Race

I remember a seminar held at the University of Heidelberg, soon after Hitler came to power. Karl Jaspers, who was shortly to lose his professorship because he had committed the crime of Rassenschande—in other words, because he had married a Jewess—was discussing a student's essay on Hegel's philosophy. He said: “In these days when we hear all too much about race, I advise you to read X's book on ‘race among the herrings’. You will then see what we know about race today, when human passions are not involved.”

A good word for literature

The student has the right to ask of each course, What's in it for me? or, more elegantly, What value is to be gained from the study of this subject? Below are some of the reasons I give in defense of a study of American literature, reasons that with a few modifications will support the study of any literature. Reason one. The classics give the reader profound insights into human nature as it exists today. Instead of belonging in a museum with horse cars and steam locomobiles, these works in the deepest sense are as contemporary as a jet airplane or a parking meter. Although Rip Van Winkle was published almost a century and a half ago, any teenager or adult can share in Rip's amazement at the changes made by time. Rip, coming down from his long sleep on the mountain to find his wife dead, his companions scattered, and his children grown up, is you and I grown old, only a little less suddenly and inexplicably. Long before the vogue of Freud and Adler, how subtly the human mind was studied by Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain! Benjamin Franklin, at once author, publisher, scientist, inventor, diplomat, and public citizen, tells the reader how to solve the ever timely question of winning over an unfriendly person. (Franklin borrowed a book from the person in question, read it, and returned it with a note of thanks.) Franklin has even offered a suggestion on the perennial problem of raising money through solicitation: . I advise you to apply to all those who you know will give something; next, to those who you are uncertain whether they will give anything or not, and show them the list of those who have given; and lastly, do not neglect those who you are sure will give nothing, for in some of them you may be mistaken. One would thumb through twentieth century textbooks of morbid psychology in vain to match the portrait of the suspicious mind, doubting and doubting its doubts, which

Language Analysis and the Concept "Environment"

you want to find out anything from the theoretical about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds. To him who is a discoverer in this field the products of his imagination appear so necessary and natural that he would like to have them regarded by others, not as creations of thought but as given realities. These words sound like an invitation to you to walk out of this lecture. You will say to yourselves, the fellow's a working physicist himself and ought therefore to leave all questions of the structure of theoretical to the epistemologists. (Einstein, 1934) Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a uniform system of In this system single experiences must be correlated with the theoretic structure in such a way that the resulting coordination is unique and convincing. sense-experiences are the given subjectmatter. But the theory that shall interpret them is man-made. It is the result of an extremely laborious process of adaptation: hypothetical, never completely final, always subject to question and doubt. scientific way of forming concepts differs from that which we use in our daily life, not basically, but merely in the more precise definition of concepts and conclusions; more painstaking and systematic choice of experimental material; and greater logical economy. By this last we mean the effort to reduce all concepts and correlations to as few as possible independent basic concepts and axioms. (Einstein, I940) If we substitute the words and for the words physicists and science in the above quotations from Einstein, we will have succinctly stated the problem we ecologists face in ridding ourselves of our confusions of ideas with realities and in translating our observations and experiments into communicable knowledge as a logically uniform system of thought. The development of Ecology has been characterized by many controversies that appear to us to be largely in the realm of words rather than deeds. This is not surprising, however, because the highly complex nature of the relations between the environment and organisms often leads to both frustration in interpretation and to vagueness in generalization. The aggregate nature of vegetation and the ensuing abstract conceptual complexities as they are necessarily handled in language, have contributed to a compounding of this confusion. Such perennially current questions as Do communities really exist ?, Should the fundamental unit of study be the individual, the population, the community, or the ecosystem ?, Is the classification of communities desirable?, and Is the ecosystem so complex as to defy significant analysis ? appear by their context to be resolvable largely upon the basis of additional empirical phenomena. But, in reality, they can be enormously clarified through a proper knowledge of our medium of understanding and communication without recourse to new facts. We have become convinced that where controversy reigns for long periods in science, in spite of the discoveries and new techniques developed by generations of scientists, the difficulty is probably not so much inherent in the material as in the language in which it is being discussed. Language analysis provides an approach to the resolution of some of these difficulties. Several scientific fields have been illuminated by the use of these methods, the most prominent among them being physics and psychology. It seems to us that there might be some values here for the ecologist. We have investigated, in particular, the Theory of Signs (Morris, 1938) and applied these methods to the language in which our various concepts of the environment have been expressed. As a result we have been led to a reappraisal of this key concept in the structure of ecological knowledge. Although we cannot here deal with the Theory of Signs in great detail, we would like to present a brief resume before embarking upon our analysis of the concept environment.' We solicit patience with what may seem to be a tedious presentation of subtle details which we hope will give a background in the terminology and the concepts that we employ in our explanations. We hope that the reader will not leave us as Einstein thought his listeners might, convinced that this is not Ecology. We wish to express our appreciation to David Rynin for many helpful suggestions in the formulation of our concepts, but we do not imply that he is in any way responsible for what may prove to be our misuse of them. Albert Ulrich read the 1 Following semantic convention, the same word may appear in quotation marks, in italics, and in ordinary type. This indicates as the subject respectively the word, the concept, or the phenomenon of nature.

Transcendent Space

As my name has been mentioned by Prof. Sylvester, at p. 238 of NATURE, in connection with this subject, I must ask you to allow me to make a brief remark thereupon. With the late Prof. Donkin I have not the least doubt as to this notion being “only a disguised form of algebraical formulisation.” I observe that Prof. Sylvester, while hypothetically mentioning his own blindness, backs up his belief by the names of seven great mathematicians, who are hypothetically assumed to have “an inner assurance of the reality” of space of four dimensions. A roll-call of great names is no evidence of a strong position, and in the present case the citation is somewhat unfortunate. My old friend Dr. Salmon, who is one of the seven mathematicians cited, would, I am sure, disclaim any such “inner assurance.” Without any breach of confidence I may quote his own reply to a question which I put to him long before the delivery of Prof. Sylvester's address. It was in these words: “I do not profess to be able to conceive affairs of four dimensions. . . I advise you to believe whatever Sylvester tells you, for he has the power of seeing things invisible to ordinary mortals.”