Categories In Ways Research Articles

Insights into the origins of knowledge from the cognitive neuroscience of blindness

Children learn about the world through senses such as touch, smell, vision, and audition, but they conceive of the world in terms of objects, events, agents, and their mental states. A fundamental question in cognitive science is how nature and nurture contribute to the development of such conceptual categories. What innate mechanisms do children bring to the learning problem? How does experience contribute to development? In this article we discuss insights into these longstanding questions from cognitive neuroscience studies of blindness. Despite drastically different sensory experiences, behavioural and neuroscientific work suggests that blind children acquire typical concepts of objects, actions, and mental states. Blind people think and talk about these categories in ways that are similar to sighted people. Neuroimaging reveals that blind people make such judgements relying on the same neural mechanisms as sighted people. One way to interpret these findings is that neurocognitive development is largely hardwired, and so differences in experience have little consequence. Contrary to this interpretation, neuroimaging studies also show that blindness profoundly reorganizes the visual system. Most strikingly, developmental blindness enables “visual” circuits to participate in high-level cognitive functions, including language processing. Thus, blindness qualitatively changes sensory representations, but leaves conceptual representations largely unchanged. The effect of sensory experience on concepts is modest, despite the brain's potential for neuroplasticity.

Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction Suzanne Del Gizzo Amy L. Strong . Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. xiii + 174 pp. Over the past twenty-five years, Ernest Hemingway has been undergoing the scholarly equivalent of an "extreme makeover." In the early 1980s, criticism of the great, macho, celebrity writer of modern American literature, who inspired protective loyalty in some critics and outright antipathy in others, seemed to have reached a saturation point. One leading critic even announced that he believed "there was nothing more to be said about Hemingway's fiction" (qtd. in Strong vii). But the publication of The Garden of Eden in 1986 changed everything. Since 1986, Hemingway scholarship has become a boom industry as critics have tackled issues of gender and sexual identity from nearly every conceivable angle and in relation to every piece of writing in Hemingway's oeuvre. As a result, long held beliefs about the author's misogyny and machismo have been challenged, and a newer, less easily pigeon-holed Hemingway has emerged. Amy L. Strong's Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction continues this makeover trend, just as the field appears to be reaching the point of exhaustion again, redirecting attention to Hemingway's interest in race and racial identity. Strong has been interested in Hemingway's relationship to race for quite some time (her first article on Hemingway and native Americans appeared about twelve years ago), but her decision to write what I believe is the first book-length study of Hemingway and race was prompted by the 2005 publication of Under Kilimanjaro, the scholarly edition of Hemingway's book based on his second African safari in 1953–54 (first published in 1999 as True At First Light). For Strong, the publication of Under Kilimanjaro, with its candid account [End Page 842] of Hemingway's desire to become a member of the Wakamba tribe, provides critics with the occasion to address what she rightly sees as the author's lifelong fascination with race as seriously and comprehensively as they have addressed gender issues in his work. She believes the time is ripe to challenge the perception that Hemingway is one of the "whitest writers in the American literary tradition" (11). Inspired by strategies pioneered by Toni Morrison in her groundbreaking study Playing in the Dark, Strong presents her project as "a revisionist reading of Hemingway's work" in which she examines "how Hemingway's fiction looks if we bring his nonwhite characters out of the background and asks how we must define Hemingway's conception of American identity differently when it is constructed on the basis of race" (12, 13). She acknowledges that there is already a sizeable body of scholarship on Hemingway and race, but she claims that these past efforts defanged Hemingway's racial obsessions by translating them into more familiar (and less controversial) motifs in Hemingway scholarship such as father-son relationships, primitivism, lost wilderness, and male initiation rites. The effect, she explains, is that "The critical response to issues of race in Hemingway's works . . . reveals patterns of marginalization, disavowal, and outright dismissal" (4). Her project seeks to remedy this situation by emphasizing Hemingway's awareness of and engagement with the realities of race in the construction of his nonwhite characters and his portrayals of racial interaction. It is an ambitious and worthwhile project, but the results are uneven in part because Strong cannot consistently anchor Hemingway in such realities. The first two chapters on the Nick Adams stories are the strongest in the book and will likely become a standard for future scholarship. In the first chapter, Strong persuasively argues that Nick Adams's identity cannot be fully understood without historicizing his relationship to native Americans, a relationship that she argues is "based on racial domination" (16). Through an effective pairing of "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," Strong captures Hemingway's attempts to present race as both biological and cultural, which allows him to play with racial categories in ways that capture the unstable and shifting power dynamics between Indians and whites. The next chapter focuses on Nick's relationship to...

Thugs, Black Divas, and Gendered Aspirations

This essay presents ethnographic data from more than five years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter and among African-American young women living in greater Detroit to contextualize an analysis of how the sexual identities of low-income women of color are framed by the racialized and class-based expectations of nonprofit community organizations, the welfare system, and vocational-training programs. Young black women living in postindustrial Detroit must navigate these overlapping social service networks on a daily basis and, in the process, discover the most efficacious strategies for achieving social and economic mobility. However, in the context of the Fresh Start shelter and other youth assistance programs, young women rework and disrupt identity categories in ways that demonstrate their sophistication in subverting the race and gender hierarchies that threaten their potential success. In claiming ownership of their ability to define and continually redefine their sexual identities, while staging performances of self in public and private spaces, young black women reveal their understanding of gender and its expression as inherently dynamic and unstable.

“The road to the lesbian nation is not an easy one”: “us” and “them” in Diva magazine

The present paper discusses Diva, Britain's only mainstream lesbian magazine. Using critical discourse analysis, the article explores Diva's importance to its readers and the pertinence of critical discourse analysis techniques to analysing the magazine. Looking at six consecutive issues, the study focuses on a close textual analysis, backed up by content analysis, of how the groups “us” and “them” are constructed. The paper concludes that the magazine's use of these categories in ways that bemoan yet bolster the distance between the two reflects Diva's position as the voice of an “oppressed group”.

Enjoying work or burdened by it? How anaesthetists experience and handle difficulties at work: a qualitative study

The aim of this study was to explore difficulties at work from anaesthetists' own perspective and to examine how anaesthetists handle and cope with situations that are perceived as difficult and potentially stressful. Two sets of interviews were conducted with 19 specialist anaesthetists in Sweden. The first set of interviews aimed at finding how the anaesthetists experienced difficulties at work. It consisted of in-depth interviews based on one open-ended question. We analysed the interviews with a phenomenological method, looking for themes in anaesthetists' descriptions of difficulties at work. In the second set, the interviews were semi-structured with open-ended questions, based on themes found in the first interview set. These interviews aimed at exploring how the interviewees described their ways of handling difficulties and how they coped with potentially stressful situations. Analysis of the first set of interviews resulted in five themes, describing how the anaesthetists experienced difficulties at work. All interviewees talked about difficulties related to more than one of the themes. The second set of interviews revealed two main categories of ways of handling difficulties. First, problem solving consisted of descriptions of methods for handling difficult situations which aimed at solving problems, and second, coping strategies described ways of appraising potentially stressful situations that minimized stress, despite the problem not being solved. The anaesthetists interviewed in this study maintained that they enjoyed work and could see no external obstacles to doing a good job. They had arrived at a reconciliation of their work with its inherent difficulties and problems. Getting access to their coping strategies might help young anaesthetists to come to terms with their work.

Risks to Consider When Purchasing Technology-Based IP for Securitization

This article focuses on the risks associated with technology-based intellectual property (“IP”). Transaction evaluators and originators will find a working list of risk-influenced items to consider when reviewing opportunities involving the purchase of IP for securitization, specifically in cases where the source of the asset9s value is derived from commercialization, re-commercialization, and assertion. It is intended to assist practitioners identify and assess these risks, make better-informed investment decisions, and achieve their transaction goals. A simplified framework of transaction underperformance and failure, or what can go wrong, has three risk components: amount, volatility, and duration. A review of past transaction experience yields the following categories of risk as most significant: macroeconomic and demand risk, technology risk, collateral risk, illiquidity risk, credit risk, and structural risk. While each underperforming transaction underperforms in its own unique way, there are broad categories of ways in which transactions fail. A checklist can help identify and quantify the specific risk elements within categories so they can be understood and priced. More importantly, a checklist can prompt additional questions and highlight interconnections that otherwise would not be visible. <b>TOPICS:</b>Credit risk management, credit default swaps, legal and regulatory issues for structured finance

Open and closed systems and the Cambridge School

In recent years a group of researchers at Cambridge (UK) have (re)introduced conceptions of open and closed systems into economics. In doing so they have employed these categories in ways that, in my assessment, both facilitate a significant critique of current disciplinary practices and also point to more fruitful ways of proceeding. In an issue of this journal, Andrew Mearman has advanced three criticisms of the Cambridge position which, if valid, would seriously undermine this assessment. Below I defend the Cambridge position against Mearman's criticisms.

English vowel learning by speakers of Mandarin

One of the most influential models of second language (L2) speech perception and production [Flege, Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience (York, Baltimore, 1995) pp. 233–277] argues that during initial stages of L2 acquisition, perceptual categories sharing the same or nearly the same acoustic space as first language (L1) categories will be processed as members of that L1 category. Previous research has generally been limited to testing these claims on binary L2 contrasts, rather than larger portions of the perceptual space. This study examines the development of 10 English vowel categories by 20 Mandarin L1 learners of English. Imitation of English vowel stimuli by these learners, at 6 data collection points over the course of one year, were recorded. Using a statistical pattern recognition model, these productions were then assessed against native speaker norms. The degree to which the learners’ perception/production shifted toward the target English vowels and the degree to which they matched L1 categories in ways predicted by theoretical models are discussed. The results of this experiment suggest that previous claims about perceptual assimilation of L2 categories to L1 categories may be too strong.

The Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI-Auto): problems and remedies for diagnosing panic disorder and social phobia.

In a recent study of treatment for panic disorder in primary care, the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI-Auto) was used to provide psychiatric diagnoses. However, during and after data collection, it was discovered that the CIDI appeared to place, or fail to place, a substantial number of people into diagnostic categories in ways that conflicted with the investigators' clinical experience. The wording of questions in the panic module, coupled with a lack of structured follow-up probes, resulted in apparent false negatives for panic disorder. Moreover, patients who would otherwise meet criteria for panic disorder or social phobia did not receive a diagnosis based on rules that may be discordant with clinical practice and, at times, the design of the DSM-IV. For this study, changes were made to the interview, including additional probes for the panic disorder module and modification of the decision rules used to assign or rule out diagnoses of panic disorder and social phobia. The changes resulted in greater inclusion of patients in the panic disorder and social phobia diagnostic categories and we argue that these changes to the CIDI-Auto increase the clinical validity of this instrument. We did not examine the false positive rate for the unmodified or modified CIDI, but this is an important issue that needs to be evaluated in future research.

Testing the aesthetic significance of the golden-section rectangle.

The aesthetic significance of the golden-section rectangle was tested in two studies designed to obviate some of the criticisms of earlier experiments. In the first, employing the method of use, the mean sides-ratios of samples of paintings from five subject-matter categories (landscape, still life, head-and-shoulders portrait, upper-body portrait, full-length portrait) provided no evidence for the significance of the golden section. However, the sides ratio of portraits varied between categories in ways that were consistent with the requirements of the proportions of the subject matter. In the second study, using the method of production, participants produced the most pleasing four-sided shape, under four instruction conditions. Under a 'portrait painting' condition and a 'landscape painting' condition, the mean sides-ratios differed significantly from the golden section. Under two 'context free' geometric shape conditions--horizontal rectangle and vertical rectangle--the mean sides-ratio approximated the golden section. The results are discussed in terms of the methodological requirements for a valid test of the aesthetic significance of the golden section and the possibility that this ratio may indeed have special significance.

The Edge of Chaos: Structural Conspiracy and Epistemology in The X-Files

This essay argues for the latter interpretation by broadening the focus of investigation to include ways in which The X-Files situates itself in the landscape of scientific culture in the late twentieth century–especially with regard to the field called complex system dynamics, known more popularly as chaos theory. The show uses and represents concepts associated with dynamic systems theory that allow it to explore issues connected to the blurring and violation of epistemological boundaries shared between the hard sciences and the community of believers in paranormal phenomena. Chaotic dynamics informs the show's attempt to represent the relationship between rational skepticism and intuitive belief in contemporary scientific epistemology. The X-Files focuses on the paracultural discursive arena that comprises discourse between skeptics and believers regarding paranormal phenomena to represent and comment on the complex, recursive nature of scientific epistemological boundaries in the postmodern cultural milieu. It interrogates epistemological categories inherited from classical science and the new physics–categories circulated in the feedback loop connecting the paraculture, science, popular film, and television. Through this interrogation, The X-Files raises questions about the meaningfulness of those categories in ways that are not only terrifying but that also point to a deeper reflexivity and more complex appreciation of the search for meaning than usually represented in science fiction, horror, and the other genres incorporated into the show's narrative.

THE DETERMINANTS OF ILLEGAL DRUG USE

An extensive set of self‐reported survey data exists on illegal drug use. The survey data show that drug use is quite frequent among the younger adult population, relatively infrequent among those of high‐school age, and rare among middle‐aged and older adults. Drug use varies by occupational category in ways that are difficult to rationalize. This study utilizes a model in which an individual's time is allocated among labor, non‐drug consumption, leisure, and drug use, where the individual is cognizant of the effect of drug use on his wages. The study analyzes comparative static results and then uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate a probit model of the individual decision to use drugs. The findings of the study are that non‐economic factors dominate the decision for both harder drugs and drugs more broadly defined. One must consider this finding tentative, however, since usable drug price data were not available.

Generic Adaptations to Blindness: An Alternate Method of Rehabilitation

The author suggests that it is time to abandon the traditional methods of teaching blind persons by subject area and to, instead, use a generic approach to rehabilitation. He lists a number of principles that could be applied to one or more of his nine categories of ways of viewing and coping with the problems of the total environment. This approach depends on teaching blind students how to transfer, or adapt, their knowledge of problem-solving techniques from one task to another.