Fundamental Metaphors Research Articles

Reforming Social Services in Hong Kong: The Role of Contracting and Performance Management in the Non‐Profit Sector

Contracts and performance management, along with the concept of consumerism, have become the fundamental metaphors for New Public Management (NPM) and key changes in the public service. ‘Doing well while doing good’ and finding generally acceptable accountability measures for social services have become the perennial aspirations of planners, service providers and funders. This article examines the contingent factors and rationales behind the quality movement and recontracting exercise in reforming the delivery of personal social service programs in Hong Kong within the framework of New Public Management (NPM). It explains the use of long‐term relational contracts rather than the standard business contracts between the government as funder and non‐profit organisations as service providers. It also deals with the complex relationships among quality issues, quality standards, consumerism, accountability, performance indicators, and performance management.

Information and its Role in Nature. J. G. Roederer. (2005, Springer.) Hardcover, $59.95, 235 pages. ISBN 3-540-23075-0

Information and its Role in Nature. J. G. Roederer. (2005, Springer.) Hardcover, $59.95, 235 pages. ISBN 3-540-23075-0. With the growth of the Internet, the concomitant movement of the market towards server-based vendors and efficient search engines, and the advent of high-throughput scientific methods promoting easy access to data, the storage, acquisition, and analysis of information have become some of the dominant concerns of our time. Whereas previous centuries witnessed the ascendancy of machines and built upon them mechanical theories of the universe and society, our own century has looked towards information as a fundamental metaphor for organizing science and civilization. It remains surprising therefore that no generally accepted definition of information exists, beyond that provided by Claude Shannon in 1949, whose original domain of application was somewhat limited to communication problems in engineering. Over the last twenty years several important articles and books have been published that seek to move information beyond a mere statistical measure of communication or uncertainty assaying underlying physical properties, to a position where information is treated as a part of more general complexity measures related to computational work. Physical mechanisms are considered in tandem with information, providing essential substrates and constraints on information such that only by placing matter, energy, and information on an equal footing can we hope to understand the true nature of adaptive decision making mechanisms. In addition to promoting informational sciences, this has also proven to be a program in interdisciplinary thinking, as new bridges have needed to be built between the biological, physical, and mathematical disciplines in order to fully understand their correspondences. It is in this spirit of information as a fundamental organizing principle in physical nature, and in particular adaptive nature, that Juan G. Roederer has written his book: Information and its role in nature. This is in many ways a curious book, and it is not precisely clear who the target audience is. The book is organized into six chapters (and 235 pages) on classical information theory, quantum information theory, physical interactions, the role of information in biology, the role of information in physics (described as passive), and information and the brain. The titles of the chapters provide only a clue to their contents which span the origin of the universe and the emergence of consciousness. Information in the technical sense plays only a small role in any of the chapters, and greater emphasis is placed on physical or adaptive correlations among components of a system, which we would more typically associate with complexity measures. The chapters with a physics emphasis tend to be stronger than those in biology. As I have suggested previously, the book does not provide enough detail on information theory to be useful as an introduction to the field or as a reference, and it omits altogether discussion of relative entropy, mutual information, channel coding, and network information, concepts that would have served the author’s interest in causality. The book spends a fair amount of time discussing quantum mechanics and touches on quantum information theory, but not broadly enough to provide significant utility for students of the field. The book also chooses not to discuss the physics of computation, as researched by Landauer, Bennet, and their colleagues. The book feels more like a personal odyssey through a variety of areas of great interest, loosely connected by qualitative information concepts, and is perhaps best suited to those who have already navigated through similar territories.

Twentieth-Century (Light-)Blues - The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xviii + 818 pp. ISBN 0 521 66256 7.

Twentieth-Century (Light-)Blues - The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xviii + 818 pp. ISBN 0 521 66256 7. - Volume 130 Issue 2

Moving Democracy

Practices of listening, receptive corporeal traveling, and moving the democratic table among different constituencies and locations are vital to democratic struggles in a heterogeneous world. Marginalizing these practices weakens ethical-political vision and the strategic capacities of radical democracy. First, this article discusses the importance of moving beyond the accent on voice in a lot of democratic theory, to focus more on practices of listening. Second, it discusses the limits of listening and theorizes the need for practices of receptive corporeal traveling beyond the power-saturated borders and scripted flows of human bodies that characterize most cities. Third, it suggests these insights might alter a fundamental metaphor underpinning many democratic theories, through a critical discussion of the imaginary of the solid democratic “table.” It is better to construe democracy as “tabling”: an activity in which the tables of engagement must be repeatedly altered by being moved and multiplied.

Outperforming LRU with an adaptive replacement cache algorithm

The self-tuning, low-overhead, scan-resistant adaptive replacement cache algorithm outperforms the least-recently-used algorithm by dynamically responding to changing access patterns and continually balancing between workload recency and frequency features. Caching, a fundamental metaphor in modern computing, finds wide application in storage systems, databases, Web servers, middleware, processors, file systems, disk drives, redundant array of independent disks controllers, operating systems, and other applications such as data compression and list updating. In a two-level memory hierarchy, a cache performs faster than auxiliary storage, but it is more expensive. Cost concerns thus usually limit cache size to a fraction of the auxiliary memory's size.

A fresh look

The study of speech-gesture-thought co-production serves multiple purposes, providing deep insight into many areas of investigation that go from psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics to discourse analysis, and to the neuroscience of motor action and language. In this piece, building on my previous work (with George Lakoff) on the cognitive science of mathematics (Lakoff & Nunez, 1997, 2000; Nunez & Lakoff, 1998, 2005), I focus on the study of gesture production in order to address the question of the nature of mathematics and its foundations. I analyze (gestural) convergent evidence of the psychological reality of fundamental conceptual metaphors that we claim make infinitesimal calculus possible (in particular, what concerns limits and continuity). These conceptual metaphors, which are analyzed in detail in Where mathematics comes from (Lakoff & Nunez, 2000), emerge from fundamental mechanisms of everyday human imagination, language, and cognition, and structure the inferential organization of mathematical concepts and ideas. In this chapter, I show how the study of the gesture production of professional mathematicians turns out to be crucial in characterizing (in real-time) fundamental metaphorical contents that, while making the very mathematical ideas possible, are not captured by the standard well-accepted formalisms that are taken to “define” what mathematical concepts really are.

From drowning to surfing: A slogan's significance

Godert notes that, having survived a period where we were drowning in information, we seem to be in a period where we are happily surfing the Internet. This communication considers the social implications of this change in fundamental metaphors about our relationship to information. It is first proposed that, though a paradigm shift has not occurred, the significance of the change should not be minimized. The similarities and differences between surfing and drowning are then considered. Questions suggested by these similarities and differences are offered for consideration.

Viewpoint: Hindu-Christian "Studies": Some Confessions from the Boundaries

There are times I think the term Hindu-Christian "studies" or even Hindu-Christian "dialogue" is a misnomer and a fantasy. This is so for several reasons. For one thing, there is a long history in which such "study" or conversation has been a monologue, a one-way street or an interpretation by imposition. There has been too much shouting at each other from caves and not enough honesty, negotiation, and mutual respect of personhood on the boundaries between where peoples live. For another, such engagements are not and never again can be merely one on one discourses between persons with single identities. We are each increasingly persons with multiple identities, in the process of becoming different persons even as we "dialogue". None of us truly represents whatever "authentic" Christianity or Hinduism is supposed to be. Nor can any of us speak, listen, or study in isolation from the dynamics of global processes where multiple forces and multiple religions impinge on one's self-representations. Not only that: I have been increasingly pessimistic that whatever some of us as individuals may do or think, a vast majority of our coreligionists remain blissfully unaware of the need for inter-religious understanding or the desirability of rethinking fundamental metaphors in light of such conversations.

The Cosmo-political Background of Heaven's Mandate

A preoccupation with cosmology and the correlation of celestial events with terrestrial activity dates back to the very beginnings of Chinese civilization. The existence of such a mindset is shown by archeo-logical discoveries from the Neolithic as well as the early Bronze Age. The belief in heaven-dwelling high gods like Shang Di and Tian also had antecedents in the pre-Shang period. In addition, analysis of scientifically verifiable accounts of planetary massings from the second millennium B.C. suggests that important cosmological and astrological notions took shape much earlier than previously thought. On the basis of this evidence it now appears likely that such conceptions are intimately connected both with influential later beliefs about a Mandate of Heaven, which asserted heavenly intervention as the cause of change in temporal governance, and with later Five Elements speculative schemes, which claimed to discern a preordained phenomenological pattern in the dynastic succession. The cosmicization of experience in the archaic period to which the evidence points and the vehement reassertion of Heaven's Mandate by the Zhou dynasty founders together confirm the epoch-making historical role of the Shang-Zhou transition in decisively reaffirming “patterning oneself in Heaven's image” (xiang tian象天) as the fundamental metaphor in Chinese political legitimation.

COMIC VIRTUE AND COMMENDABLE VICE: GUAN HANQING'SJIU FENGCHENANDWANG JIANG TING

Introduction In an attempt to elucidate the intersection between the norms of the stage and those of the social order, David Johnson has suggested, fully intending the pun, that “[v]irtue is not a condition of the soul, it is a way of acting …. If basic moral concepts are defined in behavioral terms, then it is not surprising that the stage–both the ritual arena and the opera stage–becomes a fundamental metaphor for life.“ Clearly, theatrical performance tapped into a highly elaborated discourse in Chinese culture, that is an abiding concern with the fulfillment of one's social role(s). As William T. Rowe puts it, “[b]y routinely acting out the duties of his or her role in a manner consistent with the li, each participant … continually reaffirmed and reproduced the cosmic, the political, and the civilized social order.“ Yet unlike ritual manuals, philosophical texts, and ritual drama, comedies manipulated moral concepts with a view towards laughter. Furthermore, with the propensity of comedy to draw attention to its own conventions, comic discourse also continuously commented on its own status as fiction. Still as Henri Bergson noted, “laughter is always the laughter of a group.” In this dual appeal to shared laughter and to shared values, the precise relation between comic performance and moral import was subject to complex negotiations.

Serpent et féminité, métaphores du corps réel des dieux

Simone Mauclaire, Serpent and Womanhood, Metaphors of the Gods* Real Body. - Through an analysis of certain mythical and ritual complexes, light is shed on an essential aspect of the Japanese notion of god, kami. The notion of the « gods' real body » corres- ponds to the actuation of the primordial plenitude which, ordinarily invisible, contains a wild power specific to nature at its origins. The serpent/ womanhood pair has a special posi- tion among the fundamental metaphors translating this actuation. Associated with the mother-son couple, the serpent represents an « incestuous » communion with nature, the fundamental consubstantiality of nature and mankind. The serpent and womanhood are thus complementary in the representation of nature en soi. The latter, though it cannot be directly apprehended, can be conceptualized as a quantitatively limited energy that, while simultaneously recreating and consuming itself, is manifested as a cosmic constant in the eternal cycle of birth and death. The « gods' body » thus expresses the paradoxical unity of opposites.

Conceptualizing Research on Adolescent Development in the Family: Four Root Metaphors

This paper analyzes contemporary conceptual approaches to the investigation of adolescent development in the family. As a way of clarifying the current conceptual disarray in the field, a framework developed by philosopher Stephen Pepper is presented of four fundamental metaphors that have formed the basis for scientific investigation. Research on adolescent development in the family exemplifying each metaphor is used to illustrate its distinctive contributions and limitations. Possibilities for reconciliation among the metaphors are then considered. Investigators are encouraged to see the implications of their choices in the context of this wider conceptual perspective.