Familiar Facts Research Articles

Not just a pretty face: economic drivers behind the arts‐in‐business movement

PurposeInterest in the uses and effects of art and methods of art making in businesses of all kinds is on the rise. In this paper, we show that the “arts‐in‐business movement” is no mere fad, that it is, in fact, driven by fundamental economic forces, two tectonic shifts moving the business world. Financial crises and other like disruptions not withstanding, these shifts will increasingly influence how companies, especially those based in developed economies, compete. Consequently, business success in a not‐too‐distant future will, for many companies, require a new understanding of art and art making, a sophisticated appreciation of, and a feel for, aesthetic principles.Design/methodology/approachWe develop an economics and business strategy based model using historical facts and empirical patterns to illustrate how two tectonic shifts now gathering force and momentum will change the way businesses, especially those based in developed economies, compete. The first shift, toward differentiation based business strategies, arises from the emerging realities of the globalized economy, and is enabled by increasingly mature communications and transportation networks. The second shift, toward iterative modes of production that lead to more artful innovation, is supported by recent developments in information technology. We compare the transformation from Industrial to Post‐Industrial economy to a centuries earlier transition from Craft to Industrial economy, demonstrating that the changes underway have potential to be every bit as important as those earlier changes. Our arguments and analyses are based on and summarize findings from a multi‐year field based research project.FindingsBusiness success in the not‐too‐distant future will, for many companies, require a new understanding of art and art making, a sophisticated appreciation of, and a feel for, aesthetic principles. Managers will need to improve their understanding of these principles, will succeed or fail in business competition based on how well they master them. Although many have long labeled certain poorly understood aspects of business “art” and wished to turn them into science or engineering, to make them more industrial, something more like the opposite will occur – some formerly industrial aspects of business will evolve into something very like art.Practical implicationsFirms that develop and exploit artful methods will be a step ahead of their competition. Insightful managers should begin now gaining a better understanding of how notions like “aesthetic coherence” can improve their ability to compete.Originality/valueThis paper looks at current events from a perspective rare in business practice and research, presenting familiar facts in a new light, and urging a long‐term view quite different to the current short‐term reasons for moving work off shore. We reach conclusions opposite (or nearly so) what many might casually assume, reaching counterintuitive endpoints of our empirically and analytically developed arguments, which many readers will consider surprising.

Abacus Proofs of Schur Function Identities

This article uses combinatorial objects called labeled abaci to give direct combinatorial proofs of many familiar facts about Schur polynomials. We use abaci to prove the Pieri rules, the Littlewood-Richardson rule, the equivalence of the tableau definition and the determinant definition of Schur polynomials, and the combinatorial interpretation of the inverse Kostka matrix (first given by Egecioglu and Remmel). The basic idea is to regard formulas involving Schur polynomials as encoding bead motions on abaci. The proofs of the results just mentioned all turn out to be manifestations of a single underlying theme: when beads bump, objects cancel.

General properties of spiral plane curves

The paper treats plane curves with monotone curvature {spirals). Some familiar facts of the geometry of spirals are generalized by way of removing requirements that the curvature be continuous and have constant sign. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a spiral with given boundary conditions are considered. The existence of bipolar equation of a spiral is also discussed. Bibliography: 8 titles.

Jump-and-Rest Effect of U.S. Business Cycles

One of the most familiar empirical stylized facts about output dynamics in the United States is the positive autocorrelation of output growth. This paper shows that positive autocorrelation can be better captured by shifts between business cycle states rather than by the standard view of autoregressive coefficients. The result is extremely robust to different nonlinear alternative models and applies not only to output but also to the most relevant macroeconomic variables.

The Straits of Malacca: Gateway or Gauntlet? (review)

Reviewed by: The Straits of Malacca: Gateway or Gauntlet? John Roosa (bio) Donald B. Freeman. The Straits of Malacca: Gateway or Gauntlet? McGill-Queen’s University Press. xxx, 249. $55.00 One of the unhappy coincidences for international trade is that its busiest shipping lane happens to be the most dangerous. About one-quarter of the world's traded goods pass through the Straits of Malacca every year, including Mideast oil bound for Japan, Chinese manufactures headed for Europe, and Indonesian coffee destined for Amsterdam. In heavy traffic, ships must delicately weave their way through the narrow straits, only five [End Page 528] kilometres of navigable width at one passage, past shallow shoals and rocky outcrops. These natural hazards are compounded by man-made ones. Legions of pirates operate with impunity from the coves and deltas of Indonesia's many islands along the straits. Of the 445 piracies in the world in 2003, the plurality (121) occurred in Indonesian waters. Donald Freeman has written a comprehensive overview of the environmental, economic, and political aspects of the Straits of Malacca. His focus is on role of the straits in the 'evolving patterns of regional and economic commerce over the past several millennia.' The book is organized as neither historical narrative nor geographical description. Instead, it is organized into themes pertaining to the commercial function of the straits. The first section describes the monsoon patterns and the early long-distance wind-dependent trade. The second section outlines a series of international trading systems, from the Greco-Roman era to the present. The third section analyses the 'gatekeepers,' the regional political institutions that have controlled or influenced the traffic through the straits. The fourth section reviews the environmental and social obstacles to that traffic. The final section charts the probable future trends in shipping, Asian economic development, and the management of the straits. Given the contents, the title of the book, presenting an either/or question, is misleading. Freeman writes of the straits as both a 'gateway' and a 'gauntlet.' This book, based almost entirely on secondary sources, might be best considered a convenient compendium of information about the straits as a shipping lane. Many topics are addressed in thirty-four chapters but none is explored in much depth. For instance, there are neither detailed statistics on the volume of the current transit trade (the straits as a 'gateway') nor a careful analysis of the risks from collision and piracy (the straits as a 'gauntlet'). Although the Straits of Malacca are more dangerous than other chokepoints, such as the Strait of Gibraltar, the actual risks do not seem great. Out of the tens of thousands of vessels that pass through the straits every year (about fifty thousand, according to articles I have seen in the Asian business press), only a fraction of a percent meet with a mishap. The first two sections of the book could have been drastically pruned, since they contain much tangential information. To explain the cyclical wind patterns influencing sailing through the straits, Freeman feels he must explain, in some technical detail, the meteorology of the entire planet. To explain the global circuits of trade, he recapitulates at length familiar facts of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British empires. On occasion, the book's superficial approach leads to oversimplification. Indonesia's bellicose 'Confrontation' with Malaysia from 1963 to 1966 was not clearly motivated by territorial expansionism, as Freeman contends. President Sukarno's stated purpose for the cross-straits and cross-border hostilities - fighting 'neo-colonialism' - needs to be granted some credibility. [End Page 529] Malaysia's military at the time was little more than the British military. With 'Confrontation,' Sukarno hoped, among other things, to drive the British out of Southeast Asia. Freeman does not mention that the US, with British connivance, used Malaysia and Singapore as bases for its hostilities against Indonesia in the late 1950s. One value of Freeman's book lies in its highlighting of the tension between the international use of the straits and their local management by the bordering nation states. Since the book was published, this tension has only intensified. The post-September 11 fears about a terrorist attack in this lightly policed shipping...

On the Inverses of Brownian and Brownian-Like Matrices

In several papers by F. Valvi, sufficient conditions are given for Brownian and Brownian-like matrices to have Hessenberg inverses. We interpret these conditions from the viewpoint of familiar facts related to matrices of small triangular rank. This allows us to formulate more general assertions on the Hessenberg property of the inverse. Moreover, we explicitly find the structure of the inverse of a Brownian matrix under a certain natural “irreducibility” condition. This structure is similar to the well-known structure of the inverse of an irreducible tridiagonal matrix. Furthermore, we show that the parameters defining the inverse of an n X n Brownian matrix can be calculated in O(n) arithmetic operations.

Historical sociopragmatics: a new approach to the study of the history of Hungarian

The point of departure of this paper is that it is both timely and imperative to renew the traditional systemic approach to historical linguistics primarily focusing on Ancient Hungarian and Old Hungarian and supplement it with usage-centred research based on Middle Hungarian sources (like records of evidence in witchcraft trials). One possible way of doing that is offered by historical (socio)pragmatics, a line of study little known at present within Hungarian linguistics. Although a systematic application of (synchronically tried-and-true, all but classical) pragmatic theories and methods to historical material may come up against unforeseeable or even unresolvable difficulties, such „experimentation” is a promising enterprise: the pragmatic point of view and the theories built on it may provide historical investigations with a framework that can not only be expected to yield new conclusions but also to throw new light upon familiar facts of language history. The title of this paper raises two questions: 1. Is a new approach to the study of the history of Hungarian needed at all? and 2. What is historical sociopragmatics? In what follows, I will try to answer both questions in that order.

Frontal and parietal lobe activation during transitive inference in humans.

Cortical areas engaged in knowledge manipulation during reasoning were identified with functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while participants performed transitive inference (TI) on an ordered list of 11 items (e.g. if A < B and B < C, then A < C). Initially, participants learned a list of arbitrarily ordered visual shapes. Learning occurred by exposure to pairs of list items that were adjacent in the sequence. Subsequently, functional MR images were acquired as participants performed TI on non-adjacent sequence items. Control tasks consisted of height comparisons (HT) and passive viewing (VIS). Comparison of the TI task with the HT task identified activation resulting from TI, termed 'reasoning', while controlling for rule application, decision processes, perception, and movement, collectively termed 'support processes'. The HT-VIS comparison revealed activation related to support processes. The TI reasoning network included bilateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), pre-supplementary motor area (preSMA), premotor area (PMA), insula, precuneus, and lateral posterior parietal cortex. By contrast, cortical regions activated by support processes included the bilateral supplementary motor area (SMA), primary motor cortex (M1), somatic sensory cortices, and right PMA. These results emphasize the role of a prefrontal-parietal network in manipulating information to form new knowledge based on familiar facts. The findings also demonstrate PFC activation beyond short-term memory to include mental operations associated with reasoning.

Edward II and Ireland (in fact and in fiction)

One of the most familiar facts in the history of the medieval lordship of Ireland is that, despite plans by Henry III in 1243 and by Edward III in 1331–2, no king of England came to Ireland between the expedition of King John in 1210 and those of Richard II in 1394–5 and 1399. I am not about to subvert the historical record by revealing a previously unknown royal visit to Ireland, but there is, as I shall try to demonstrate, enough evidence, some of it very strange indeed, to justify the title of this article. The unknown author of the prophecy entitled theVerses of Gildas,who wasapparentlywriting in the middle of the reign of Edward II, forecast that in 1320 the king of England would come to Ireland after the passing of a certain grave crisis. Once in Ireland, he would bring about peace between the English and the Irish, who would live together in harmony under one English law. The English would demolish the walls of their fortifications, while the Irish would cut down the woodlands which served as their defences. On a charitable interpretation, one might find a parallel between these predictions and the letter written to Edward II by Pope John XXII in May 1318, in which the pope asked the king to give his attention to the grievances of the Irish: these grievances had been expressed at length in the famous Irish Remonstrance, which had probably been composed towards the end of 1317 and had recently been received in Avignon.

Propertius 2.10 and 11 and the Structure of Books ‘2A’ and ‘2B’

The manuscripts of Propertius present us with a single, massive ‘Book 2’ over thirteen hundred and sixty lines long. Like many before me, I am convinced that this ‘Book 2’ is a mistake of transmission and actually preserves the remnants oftwoancient books. In this article I identify and discuss the poem which I believe closed the first of the ancient books; for convenience's sake we can call this book ‘Book 2a’. I shall be saying something, too, about the structure and content of both ancient books — of Book 2b as well as Book 2a.It was Lachmann who first made the — to me — irresistible suggestion that our ‘Book 2’ is the product of two ancient books. There has been strong support for this view. For example, a succinct case is put forward by Otto Skutsch; and highly convincing and detailed support has been offered in an important recent paper by Heyworth. There are intricacies of evidence to consider (for example, Nonius Marcellus' citation of our 3.21.14), but I shall set these to one side. I shall simply cite two crucial and probably familiar facts, which are in summary as follows.

Propertius 2.10 and 11 and the Structure of Books ‘2A’ and ‘2B’

The manuscripts of Propertius present us with a single, massive ‘Book 2’ over thirteen hundred and sixty lines long. Like many before me, I am convinced that this ‘Book 2’ is a mistake of transmission and actually preserves the remnants of two ancient books. In this article I identify and discuss the poem which I believe closed the first of the ancient books; for convenience's sake we can call this book ‘Book 2a’. I shall be saying something, too, about the structure and content of both ancient books — of Book 2b as well as Book 2a.It was Lachmann who first made the — to me — irresistible suggestion that our ‘Book 2’ is the product of two ancient books. There has been strong support for this view. For example, a succinct case is put forward by Otto Skutsch; and highly convincing and detailed support has been offered in an important recent paper by Heyworth. There are intricacies of evidence to consider (for example, Nonius Marcellus' citation of our 3.21.14), but I shall set these to one side. I shall simply cite two crucial and probably familiar facts, which are in summary as follows.

Chevalley groups over commutative rings: I. Elementary calculations

This is the first in a series of papers dedicated to the structure of Chevalley groups over commutative rings. The goal of this series is to systematically develop methods of calculations in Chevalley groups over rings, based on the use of their minimal modules. As an application, we give new direct proofs for normality of the elementary subgroup, description of normal subgroups and similar results due to E. Abe, G. Taddei, L. N. Vaserstein, and others, as well as some generalizations. In this first part we outline the whole project, reproduce construction of Chevalley groups and their elementary subgroups, recall familiar facts about the elementary calculations in these groups, and fix a specific choice of the structure constants.

Computers And Growth

The purpose of this paper is to describe the impact of investment in computers on the growth of the U.S. economy. The economic literature on computers is relatively rich in information on the decline in computer prices and the growth of computer investment. Constant quality price indices for computers have been included in the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) since 1986. These indices employ state of the art methodology to capture the rapid evolution of computer technology. While the annual inflation rate for overall investment has been 3.66 percent for the period 1958 to 1992, computer prices have declined by 19.13 percent per year! Similarly, overall investment grew at 3.82 percent, while investment in computers increased at an astounding 44.34 percent! These familiar facts describe growth in the output of computers. The objective of this paper is to complete the picture by analyzing the growth of computer services as inputs. In a pioneering paper Bresnahan (1986) has focused on pecuniar...

Optimal Steiner Points

Given three points P, Q, and R in the plane, the shortest path connecting the points using only straight lines between the points is equal to the sum of the shorter two sides of APQR. By introducing a fourth point interior to APQR when all its angles are less than 120?, a shorter network is obtained. There is a point S in APQR such that the sum of the Euclidean distances of S from the three vertices is minimized. This point is called the Steiner point of the triangle, after the mid-19th-century Swiss geometer Jacob Steiner, an early investigator of the question of minimal networks among a finite number of points [2]. For example, in an equilateral triangle of side 1, a minimal path that connects the vertices and stays on the perimeter has length 2, whereas a network of vertices and Steiner point S has length 3 = 1.732, still more than half the perimeter. By introducing a well-known Minkowski metric and constructing the Steiner point with respect to that metric, the length of the minimal network can be improved for any three vertices to half the length of the perimeter. Such a Steiner point is optimal in the sense that the lengths in the network could not be shortened and still satisfy the triangle inequality required in a metric space. A point S in the metric space (d, X) is said to be an optimal Steiner point of A PQR if the d-length of the network connecting P, Q, R, and S is half the d-length of the perimeter of A PQR. We shall see that, if the metric is Minkowski, all triangles have optimal Steiner points if and only if the defining unit ball is a parallelogram. We start by noting some familiar facts. Given any three positive real numbers [a, b,c], some or all of which may be the same, the triple can be the distances between three points in the Euclidean plane, denoted by E2, as long as the sum of any two is greater than or equal to the third. [1, 1, 1] can be realized in E2 as the distances between the vertices P1, P2, P3 of any equilateral triangle of side length 1. [3,4,5] and [1, 1, 2] will do, but [1, 1, 2.001] will not. These are particular examples of the more general concept of a metric set. A set F of n abstract points together with a distance function d: F X F -> [0, oo) satisfying the axioms for a metric space is called a metric set of n points. Any metric set of three points can be embedded in the plane with the Euclidean distance function as a triangle or as collinear points. When a fourth point is introduced, there are six distances. Denoting d(Pi, Pj) by dij for i, j = 1,2,3,4, we always keep the order [dI2, d23, d3l, dI4, d24, d34]I Going back to an equilateral triangle of side 1 and vertices P1, P2, and P3 in E2, let us look for a fourth point P4 that has distance 1 from each vertex. The metric set {P1, P2, P3, P4} will have associated with it the list of six distances [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]. There is no such point in the plane. If we are willing to go to Euclidean 3-space, the four points can be realized as vertices of a tetrahedron with all sides length 1.

Museums and the Meanings of Their Contents

Museums are cultural institutions whose concerns embrace the acquisition and communication of what is taken for knowledge about human beings, their practices and products, and their natural and social environment. But however comprehensive their holdings may be, however sharply focused their presentations, their contributions to understanding must remain always incomplete, partial, and provisional. An adequate understanding of a people's culture most certainly requires knowledge of many fields including the physical geography and climate, as well as its history, social structure and artifacts; but even museums whose researchers embrace all these fields cannot escape the problems that arise from interpreting and presenting products rather than processes, effects rather than causes. Only art historians, as Donald Preziosi among others has argued,1 have seriously tried to limit the notion of culture to what may be found in art museums, or to imply that a certain type of art museum should be the model for all museums. This said, however, museums necessarily decontextualize and then recontextualize their contents, thereby radically altering the matrices through which meanings may be projected, discerned, constructed. And necessarily the contexts in which museums exist constantly change and have their individual histories. Furthermore, it is a matter of varying importance that to a large extent museums are concerned with the past. These very familiar facts--I trust that the notion of a fact is not yet banned

Pre-Raphaelites Re-viewed edited by Marcia Pointon (review)

106Victorian Review in Victorian England is a tremendously valuable contribution to the understanding of an important aspect of Victorian EngUsh society. There can be no argument with the author ' s concluding comment that "there is a need for greater interest to be taken in the legal system—the laws themselves, who operates them, and who benefits from their operation" (268). Notes 1.The English legal profession was then characterized by two major "branches* which operated in effect as distinct professions providing related legal services. The Bar ("barrister's branch") was the socially more exclusive of the two, enjoyed a monopoly of superior court practice, and was governed by four "Inns of Court" in London. The so-called "lower branch" of the legal profession consisted of attorneys (also called solicitors), was much less socially exclusive, much larger, and provided the vast bulk of legal services throughout the country. 2.I am grateful to Dr. Barry Wright for sensitizing me to this. Of course there are many stopping points short of simplistic conspiracy theories but, as Wright's extraordinary scholarship illustrates, elements of instrumentalism and deliberate elite manipulation of law routinely intrude in times of perceived crisis. WES PUE University ofManitoba Marcia Pointon, ed. Pre-Raphaelites Re-viewed. Manchester UP, 1989. viii + $49.95 US (cloth); $18.95 US (paper). The word play in the title of Marcia Pointon's essay collection PreRaphaelites Re-viewed holds out an engaging offer. In this set of eight closely focused articles, written by British and American scholars in the fields of Uterature and art history, we are asked to take a new look at famiUar terrain, the art, the writings, and the ethos of the Pre-RaphaeUte movement. Few would argue with this proposition. Despite the vast extant Uterature on the movement—and few movements have been so meticulously documented—the discourse has tended to be redundant, telling and retelling the same story of youth, rebeUion, and romanticism, all in the cause of a purer British art. Although the story still pleases, as Reviews107 any undergraduate instructor will attest, it has ceased to inform and enlighten. A further problem with Pre-Raphaelite scholarship is its legacy of personalization and bias. From the beginning, the original seven Brothers wrote about and promoted one another, sought out "friendly" critics and endured, especially in the first years, some of the most vituperative criticism ever sent to press. The list of primary biographers—Wüliam Michael Rossetti, Ford Madox Hueffer, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Amy Woolner, Diana Holman Hunt, to name only a few----reads like a guest list for a family reunion. Each writer offers his or her own version of the same story, placing their father/uncle/grandfather at the center of the circle, then sets the familiar facts in motion around them. Even works conceived as a corrective—notably Jan Marsh's The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (1985)—must ultimately travel the same worn road; trying to balance the story unfortunately tells us the story again. Pointon ' s coUection appears at the end of a decade that saw a new analytical perspective on the Pre-Raphaelite movement The retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery (1984) and its comprehensive catalogue The Pre-Raphaelites played down the anecdotes and put forth the solid information on sources and provenance needed to work with the pictures at a deeper level of analytical engagement The essay coUection published in conjunction with the exhibition—Pre-Raphaelite Papers (ed. Leslie Parris, 1984)—advanced an approach of closer reading and broader contextual integration. These volumes broke ground for the innovative analyses that foUowed—by Deborah Cherry and Griselda PoUack, by Lynda Nead, and, most significantly by Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn. In common with the efforts of Pointon and her contributing authors, these scholars all seek to apply new, or at least alternative and less biased, modes of interpretation to the production of the PreRaphaelites , leading to deeper and wider understanding of the works in their broad Victorian context A part of a series published by Manchester University Press on "Cultural Politics," Pre-Raphaelites Re-viewed adheres to the observation that "texts" are "as inseparable from the conditions of their production and reception in history...

The Difference Equation Xn = axn−l + b

The study of arithmetic and geometric progressions is part of the traditional twelfth-grade mathematics curriculum. This article discusses a generalization of these concepts that has many important applications. Furthermore, our principal formula can be obtained easily from familiar facts about arithmetic and geometric progressions.

Price specification and the demand for public goods

Nearly all public expenditure demand studies define the marginal price for publicly provided goods as the household's share of the local property tax burden, or what is often called the tax- price. Such a definition is at odds with two familiar facts: taxes are ordinarily distortionary, and property values are often influenced by the value of local services. This paper constructs a theoretically consistent marginal tax-price measure incorporating these considerations. The new measure demonstrates that previous estimates of the price and income elasticities of demand for public services are biased, except under very restrictive circumstances. Moreover, the direction of this bias will depend upon the actual incidence of public spending and the tenure status of residents.

Social science and social practice

Science breaks new trails for technology but social science has yet to break new trails for social technology. Why is this? One hypothesis explains this with reference to the complexity of the social world and the still rudimentary nature of the social sciences. This paper argues for an alternative hypothesis, claiming that social science research is incapable of generating technologies not already part of the human repertoire. Drawing on a range of social science inquiry from economics to psychology, it shows that the ‘mechanisms’ posited to explain normal and puzzling human behavior depend on familiar facts about humans which future investigations cannot overturn. Finally, it is shown that even when these familiar facts are themselves explained, the generative mechanisms posited to account for them are no longer within the sphere of the social sciences.

Zero-set ultrafilters and Gδ-closures in uniform spaces

AbstractThe paper examines the classes K1 and Γ1 of Hausdorff uniform spaces which are Gδ-closed in their Samuel compactifications, or completions. It is shown that the classes are epi-reflective, the reflections K1 and Γ are described, K1 and Γ1 are represented as epi-reflective hulls, membership in the classes is described by fixation of certain zero-set ultrafilters, and it is shown that k1 = Γ1 exactly on spaces without discrete sets of measurable power. The results include familiar facts about realcompact and topologically complete topological spaces and are closely connected with the theory of metric-fine uniform spaces.Subject classification (Amer. Math. Soc. (MOS) 1970): primary 54 C 50, 54 E 15, 18 A 40; secondary 54 B 05, 54 B 10, 54 C 10, 54 C 30.