Critics Say Research Articles

Working Together to Improve Cybersecurity

“Critics say use closed systems, But WE must grow with open systems and not fear bad actors”

We Made It in Venice! But Then …? Reversing Notions of Center and Periphery

We Made It in Venice! But Then …? Reversing Notions of Center and Periphery

3. Towards a Fatal University: Temporal (In)determinacies in Heisenberg and Derrida

Abstract: Many lament the poor state of the university as an effect of neo-liberalisation. The university, these critics say, has strayed from its ‘pure’ pursuit of knowledge, justice, and truth. This paper takes issue with this explanation. It suggests instead that this state signals a reversal of the principle of causality, which points towards the aporetic endeavour of certain ideals of academic research since their inception. What is more, it claims that the contemporary acceleration of this aporia through cybernetics has led to a situation in which especially the hard sciences start to deconstruct themselves. It will substantiate this argument by reading Jacques Derrida’s Psyche together with Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy, and point out that Heisenberg’s defence of an uncertainty principle in quantum physics, marks the return of the auto-immunity of the university project and its embodiment in the conception of linear time, eventually calling for a ‘fatal’ university instead.

Wrongs and Sanctions in the Pure Theory of Law

Wrongs and Sanctions in the Pure Theory of Law

Why Is This Candidate Listed Twice? The Behavioral and Electoral Consequences of Fusion Voting

Ballot fusion is an electoral device used in some states that permits multiple parties to endorse the same candidate for public office. The practice is at the center of a fierce policy debate concerning the legality and efficacy of ballot design: critics say fusion allows minor parties to hijack mainstream parties and complicates the voting process; advocates say fusion reduces the potential for wasted votes and increases democratic efficacy in the electorate. Participants in this policy debate all cite the welfare of the voting public in defending their views, yet claims on both sides are based on assumptions that may or may not stand up to empirical scrutiny. In this article, we fill a void in the literature by exploring whether, and to what extent, fusion voting impacts voters' perceptions, decisions, and overall voting experience. We develop a survey experiment in which individuals make electoral choices under a series of ballot designs, enabling us to evaluate counterfactuals concerning ballot fusion for the first time: how do individuals evaluating a ballot with fusion behave relative to voters who evaluate the same ballot without it? The results have important implications for electoral policy makers: ballot fusion has little impact on feelings of democratic efficacy and voting behavior, though it can compel some individuals to update their perceptions about political parties under certain circumstances.

In a strange other world. Urszula Kochanowska by Bolesław Leśmian translated into English

The article focuses on English translations of Bolesław Leśmian’s Urszula Kochanowska, especially those by Marian Polak-Chlabicz and Krzysztof Bartnicki. The author of the article aims to achieve a critical comparison between different translation strategies ventured to conquer the diffi culties associated with translating this verse, which is strongly connected with Polish culture and literature. The close-reading of the translations is accompanied by a short outline of Leśmian’s existence in English language along with an attempt to answer the question of whether translating his poetic language is at all possible or is Leśmian’s work an evident proof (as many critics say) of the phenomenon known as untranslatability.

JRC study on harvested forest area: resolving key misunderstandings

A recent study on forest harvest in the EU (Ceccherini et al. 2020) reported a strong increase in clear-cut harvested area in recent years, based on remote sensing information. This triggered a heated debate and many critical comments. Apart from several fair and constructive criticisms, which were welcome, we found that some comments have been either not based on evidence or affected by serious misunderstandings. Here we clarify some technical aspects that were omitted or misrepresented in the public debate. Overall, the original study used in a scientifically correct way the best information available at that time. After the study was published, a previously undocumented inconsistency in the time series emerged in the original dataset used. After correcting for this inconsistency, updated results confirm an increase in clear-cut harvested area, but not as abrupt as originally reported. Contrary to what many critics say, this information should be seen as complementing and not necessarily contradicting country statistics, because the latter typically refer to total harvest (including thinning, etc.) and not clear-cut only. Finally, it should not be overlooked that the main aim of the original study was to offer a vision for integrating satellite data into the monitoring of forest resources. This was achieved: the JRC study showed the potential (and limitations) for high-resolution satellite maps to track the temporal evolution of clear-cut forest harvest in EU.

Migrant Workers Among the Most Vulnerable to Himalayan Disasters

Critics say companies are failing to develop adequate emergency procedures to protect construction workers on hydropower plants in the Himalayas.

Alaska oil bid alarms scientists

Mapping plan for Arctic refuge ignores risks, critics say

Plan to map oil in Alaska’s Arctic refuge ignores environmental risks, critics say

Plan to map oil in Alaska’s Arctic refuge ignores environmental risks, critics say

Russia’s claim of a successful COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t pass the ‘smell test,’ critics say

Russia’s claim of a successful COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t pass the ‘smell test,’ critics say

The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot

The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot

My (Computer's) Wallace Stevens: A Cento

My (Computer's) Wallace Stevens:A Cento Maureen N. Mclane —a composition made from documents on my 2019 MacBookPro, activated via search > Wallace Stevens, which produced files from June 2019–Dec. 6, 2004; lines extracted after searching "Stevens" within a document and selecting the line(s) featuring that term OR the first sentence/lines of the document. Lines are sometimes made to enjamb. If documents repeated in several forms over many years (and several did), and I got bored, I occasionally skipped them, or chose another line/sentence from the document. Documents were searched in reverse chronological order, as presented by my search window. This Cento obviously fails the rigorous test of procedural/uncreative/etc. writing. It may fail many other tests as well, including Stevens's "It must give pleasure." My (Computer's) Wallace Stevens: A Cento. Oh but Georges Enesco. Thinkers without final thoughts: Notational Sufficiency? Attention, Possession, Notation—THE WORLD AS MEDITATION, Maureen Noelle McLane. The sey was In, at thai stoppyt and stud. On loud he criyt and bad thaim tak the flud. Graden Floe and the other sea quags that fortified the shore against invaders. Then there came a single call on the sea-pipe, and that was the signal. His sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow. "He was a seaman," said George Merry, who was examining the rags of clothing. "Leastways, this is good sea-cloth." Salgada, the Plant call'd Sea-pot-herb. Most musical most melancholy bird a nightingale is not that said Coleridge exasperated by Milton and Wallace Stevens never heard a nightingale though yes he several times said blackbird. Toward the end of his life, Wallace Stevens admitted to himself that he was not quite human. "Life is an affair of people not of places," he [End Page 72] mused to himself, "but for me life is an affair of places." Wallace Stevens sometimes cried before he set out for the insurance office; most times he swallowed the cry in his throat and walked the streets of Hartford, Connecticut, in as meticulous and composed a fashion as he could muster. Some have said he suffered in a loveless marriage; others have commented on the effects of segregation in his life—his ability to cut off his writing from the workaday week. This segregation saved him, in one sense. It kept a certain violence just below the surface. Everywhere in Stevens's poetry, some critics say, one can find marks of bourgeois displacement—the hallmark of false consciousness. Wallace Stevens created beautiful things in the midst of a neat but squalid life of regulated industry. But Wallace Stevens suffered even before his loveless marriage, because he knew he was not, could never be, quite human. He wrote exquisitely human, false things out of his real not-quite-humanity. In the next world he avoids Milton, because Milton was exceedingly human and created out of himself the most inhuman poetry in the English language. In heaven, Wallace Stevens is afraid of John Milton. Vagrancy in the Park: "They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne." We will be expecting to receive all revised chapters by September 1, 2016. No one living a snowed-in life / can sleep without a blindfold. My one eye / does not match—The Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens Thirteen Ways of Looking at a White Man: Hop for probe-quash. Capable hymen, tho. In his notebooks, Wallace Stevens wrote, "Poetry is, (and should be,) for the poet, a source of pleasure and satisfaction, and not a source of honors." Can all men, together, avenge / One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? The world is what you make of it: Recommended Hotels in Paris: All suggested hotels are very well located on the historic Left Bank. My Wallace Stevens is an insurgent inchling in the bristling forest and a stolid giant rolling metaphysical rhymes down the mountain. Here's an updated document with practical arrangements. ITALY TRIP JUNE 2017. TUM-Ti-TUM: Ploughing on Sunday The poems in this collection were originally published in the following— Vagrancy in the Park. I don't hate poetry, nor do I love it. In...

Study of 'sea nomads' under fire in Indonesia.

Critics say study lacked local ethical approval and role for Indonesian experts.

Industry learns to love REACH

The European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic), Europe’s leading chemical industry association, has made a U-turn in its view of REACH, Europe’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation & Restriction of Chemicals legislation. After years of kicking and screaming to resist REACH—the biggest and most expensive body of chemicals regulation ever introduced—Cefic has emerged as its biggest advocate. Cefic Director General Marco Mensink and his colleagues now argue that if chemical firms around the world buy into a REACH-style system, which requires safety data on individual substances, then European chemical firms will be able to show that their products are among the safest and should face fewer barriers to trade. This attitude marks an about-face in Cefic’s approach to REACH, industry critics say. REACH was conceived in the 1990s as a way to regulate chemicals in the European Union and encourage substitution of dangerous substances. It entered into force on June 1, 2007, and

Studies downplay threat that dams pose to primates in Guinea and Indonesia, critics say

Studies downplay threat that dams pose to primates in Guinea and Indonesia, critics say

Plan for 2020 U.S. census is fatally flawed, critics say.

Using existing records to ensure accuracy is unlikely to succeed, experts predict.

Fine Arts: 5. The Iaşi School of Painting – Between Myth and Reality

Abstract This paper analyzes a phrase which is specific of cultural space from Iași called "The Iași School of Painting", a term which, as art critics say, is distinguished by several features including the harmony of the composition, the chromaticism and refinement of artistic expression. So, we start in this study with the founders of the first institution of artistic education in Iasi, which strongly influenced the local creative style of plastic expression, then, we talk about the period in which was materialized fully the traditional way of the Iasi school of painting. After December 1989 the visual art from Iasi has gone through many changes, being outlined a new approach to the artistic phenomenon in the context of technological development and the globalization, the moment in which the visual artists tried new plastics formulas. Today the expression the Iasi School of Painting is only a metaphor which illustrates the connection with the glorious past of the great masters.

Albrecht Penck: Vorbereiter und Wegbereiter der NS-Lebensraumpolitik?

Abstract. Albrecht Penck was one of the eminent representatives of Quaternary research in the first half of the twentieth century. But apart from this, there was a political-geographical side to Penck, which, since 1945, has long been ignored or downplayed by geographers. Today, given his concept of Volks- und Kulturboden, he is considered as having ushered in German geography the völkisch (ethno-nationalistic) turn. Thus, critics say, he paved the way for Nazi Lebensraum policies and became an accomplice in the resulting crimes. The present contribution examines Penck's political-geographical worldview and reaches an ambivalent conclusion regarding the accusations.

Kant and the critique of the ethics-first approach to politics

Contemporary ‘realists’ attack the Kantian influence on political philosophy. A main charge is that Kantians fail to understand the specificity of politics and neglect to develop a ‘distinctively political thought’ that differs from moral philosophy. Instead, the critics say, Kantians are guilty of an ‘ethics-first approach to politics,’ in which political theory is a mere application of moral principles. But what does this ethics-first approach have to do with Kant himself? Very little. This article shows how Kant’s approach to political theory at a fundamental level includes political institutions, power, and coercion as well as disagreement, security, and coordination problems. In contrast to realists, Kant has a fundamental principle, which can explain why and guide how we ought to approach the political question, namely the norm of equal freedom. Yet, Kant’s theory does not take the form of a moralistic ought addressed to the isolated individual, but concerns a problem that we share as interdependent beings and that requires common institutions. The fruitfulness of the Kantian approach, then, is that it can take the political question seriously without being uncritical of actual politics and power, and that it can be normative without being moralistic.