Paradox Of Integration Research Articles

Auditory spectral integration of dynamic signals

Auditory spectral integration often refers to the ability of the auditory system to sum information across a wide frequency range to improve the detectability of a supra-critical bandwidth signal in a masking experiment. However, in other paradigms, the spectral components of these broad bandwidth signals can be resolved by auditory system. These findings lead to a resolution versus integration paradox for the frequency domain similar to the resolution versus integration paradox in the time domain that led to the multiple-looks hypothesis [N. F. Viemeister and G. H. Wakefield, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 90, 858–865 (1991)]. In speech, spectral integration refers to finding that two or more resonance peaks in a synthetic vowel can be approximated by a single peak located at the spectral center-of-gravity (COG). In 1996, Lublinskaja demonstrated that changing the COG of a two-resonance signal over time leads listeners to hear a virtual frequency transition that follows the dynamic COG. Dynamic signals may require the auditory system to take multiple looks in both time and frequency. This talk will present a series of psychoacoustic experiments using dynamic signals and a computational model that incorporates peripheral auditory processing and a modification of the PSC model.

Rethinking Inclusion: Schoolwide Applications

Inclusion is usually regarded as the placement of special education students in general education settings. But Mr. Sailor and Ms. Roger present a new vision of integrated education, in which previously specialized adaptations and strategies are used to enhance the learning of all students. AS A FIELD, special education presents an excellent case study of the paradox of differentiation and integration, wherein we seek solutions through increased specialization but, in so doing, we redefine a problem in terms of discrete parts at the expense of the whole. As Thomas Skrtic pointed out more than a decade ago, a large and ever-widening gap exists between the purpose of special education -- to provide needed supports, services, adaptations, and accommodations to students with disabilities in order to preserve and enhance their educational participation in the least restrictive environment -- and its practice.1 And that practice has evolved over three decades into a parallel and highly differentiated educational structure, often with only loosely organized connections to the general education system.2 Having disengaged from general education early on, special education began to undergo a process that, at times, has seemed to mimic cell division. At one point in its ontogeny, the field could list some 30 distinct eligibility categories for special education services (e.g., learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, severe disabilities, autism, and so on).3 Many of these early categories further subdivided, with autism, for example, splitting into a host of subcategories lumped under autism spectrum disorders.4 How has all of this come about? The paradox of differentiation and integration -- with its tensions in practice and contradictions in policy -- offers a reasonable hypothesis. In our efforts to better meet the educational needs of specific identifiable groups, we have promoted differentiation at the expense of integration. If such a policy produced exemplary outcomes, the only remaining questions would concern how to direct scarce resources to meet the needs of a few individuals, and the values underlying special education would no doubt resolve the tension in favor of customization and differentiation. But the positive outcomes don't seem to be there.5 In its early days, special education embraced the diagnostic/prescriptive model characteristic of modern medicine, and disability was viewed as pathology. Psychology, with its partner the test industry, became the gatekeeper for special education. Students referred by teachers and parents were diagnosed in one of the categories of disability and tagged for separate (highly differentiated) treatment. Indeed, special education policy handbooks at the district level came to resemble the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Then in the 1980s, the U.S. Department of Education began to advance policy reforms designed to slow the growth in the number of special education categorical placements and practices. These initiatives occurred against a backdrop of publications citing positive outcomes from integrated practices and a corresponding barrage of studies associating separate classrooms and pullout practices with negative outcomes.6 The first of these reforms was called the Regular Education Initiative and was designed to stimulate the provision of special education supports and services in general education classrooms. It generated enormous controversy within special education. Indeed, a special issue of the Journal of Learning Disabilities was devoted entirely to an attempt to refute the research underlying the policy.7 Framing the reform of special education policy as general education policy (regular education initiative) failed completely within the community of special education. More recently, federal policy has advanced inclusion as recommended practice and has expended significant funds for training, research, and demonstration purposes. …

Martyrs are Good to Think With

MARTYRS ARE GOOD TO THINK WITH REVIEW ESSAY BY SIMON DITCHFIELD Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. By Brad S. Gregory. [Harvard Historical Studies, 134.] (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1999. Pp. xvi, 528. $49.95.) is my desire: may the love that unites you to me be such that you may be able to act like those Christian women of the first ages who, with eager desire and joy, led their own sons to martyrdom; she indeed thought herself happy who was worthy to have a martyr son. So wrote the young Cesare Baronio, future father of Roman Catholic ecclesiastical history, in a letter to his mother of December 3, 1563, in which he asked her to pray to God for him so that he might become another martyr like Stephen or Lawrence.What to the modern mind seems unthinkable is for the modern historian a (p. 74). Gregory is as uncompromising as his protagonists in raising himself to this considerable challenge and is a measure of the profundity of his critical empathy, matched by his immensely learned understanding, that he largely succeeds. For make no mistake, this is a magnificent book, whose methodological daring, cross-confessional range, first-rate texture of erudition, and clarity of exposition make essential reading for anyone who works on early modern religious culture. Like all truly original and important books, this one has a deeply felt informing principle, with which one might have a measure of disagreement (see below), but which undeniably imparts to the whole a level of sustained intellectual engagement with and a thorough understanding of its subject matter that is consistently and richly rewarding. This may perhaps best be expressed in terms of the author's intention only to make a historical contribution to our understanding of early modern Christianity, but also a methodological contribution to how historians approach it (p. 2). Central to this endeavor is Gregory's refusal to have anything to do with attempts to explain martyrs' actions in anything other than religious terms. As he puts with characteristic pith and force:Not to take such people [martyrs] on their own terms fails utterly to comprehend them, the character of their actions and the basis of their lives (p. 8) and later:If we do not 'get' martyrdom, is because we do not `get, the martyrs' religiosity (p. 101). It is not to denigrate in any way Gregory's considerable achievement to say that the originality of his book lies perhaps not so much in its parts-centered on his detailed and invariably illuminating accounts of the martyrological traditions of the Protestant, Anabaptist, and Roman Catholic confessions (although that pertaining to the second has surely not received such a perceptive and engaging treatment in English), but rather in its whole-a cross-confessional comparative approach underpinned by the intellectual energy and commitment to consider the voluminous rancor of sixteenth-century controversialists [as] ... evidence to be understood (p. 12), rather than as undigestible prejudice to be dismissively explained away. (In this respect, his command of scripture and sensitivity to biblical quotation is particularly impressive and appropriate.) Gregory also reveals himself to be a fine sometime student of the late Heiko Oberman, not only in his commitment to understand before presuming to interpret, but also through his provision of an excellent chapter on the late medieval context. Just as the Reformation did not emerge ex nihilo with Luther, the sixteenthcentury Renaissance of Christian martyrdom did not come from nowhere (p. 31). This enables us to understand the apparent paradox of the thorough integration of martyr saints in the spiritual life in a period when actual martyrdoms were conspicuous by their almost complete absence. Here Gregory makes deft use of an excellent choice of illustrations to underline the degree to which martyrs were thoroughly integrated into the cult of saints during this period-for example, of the fourteen Holy Helpers only St. …

The Paradox of Integration: Habermas and the Unfinished Project of European Union

In a recent article Jürgen Habermas (1999) highlighted the potential for the European Union to act as a vehicle for the extension of democratic governance beyond the nation state, a project aimed at limiting the socially corrosive impact of globalisation. Yet this position appears paradoxical as the European Union itself exacerbates a major aspect of globalisation: the emasculation of national parliaments known as the ‘democratic deficit’. This paradox can be understood by analysing the dynamics of post-war European integration through the lens of Habermasian social theory: EU evolution can lead either to the colonisation of the lifeworld by market and administrative subsystems (as with the democratic deficit), or to a process of lifeworld rationalisation conducive to pan-European solidarity and democracy. The latter of these tendencies could be encouraged through ‘procedural democracy’: this would institutionalise the conditions by which independent associations in European civil society, channelling their ‘communicative power’ through parliament, might reassert control over the two subsystems. In order to retain legitimacy, procedural EU democracy would have to link existing legislatures to the European Parliament, while citizenship would combine national and civic components. Hence the European Union would be more able than the nation-state to combine universal notions of justice with ethical pluralism.

The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis

* Introduction * The Paradoxes of Integration * The Moral and Intellectual Crisis of Liberal Afro-American Advocacy * The Moral Crisis of Conservative Racial Advocacy * For Whom the Bell Curves: The Intellectual and Cultural Contradictions of Genetic Determinism * Why We Still Need Affirmative Action * Conclusion: What Is to Be Done

The Paradox of Integration in Intra-State Conflicts

This article examines a seeming paradox in conflict theory. Integration and interdependence between groups is frequently seen as a conflict-preventing mechanism, and ample empirical evidence can be found in support of this view. All the same, it is apparent that conflicts do occasionally break out between interdependent groups and tend to be much more devastating than other conflicts; civil wars offer ample and tragic empirical illustrations. The authors argue that a security dilemma becomes acute in the relations between interdependent groups once the risk of a manifest conflict is there. It becomes imperative to try to strike first because the mutual vulnerability of the groups is so high. In connection with Lijphart's idea of consociationalism, the authors suggest that elite cooperation and power-sharing constitute potential ways out of the security dilemma. The creation of mutually credible, neutral institutions is the key to a lasting settlement of intra-state conflicts.

Intra-EU migration, citizenship and political union.

"Of the 14.1 million resident aliens living in the European Union (EU), 4.9 million are nationals of EU Member States residing in other Member States.... These resident alien EU nationals present a problem for maintaining democratic inclusiveness while EU Member States undergo integration....I explore this paradox of political integration by focusing on intra-EU migration and the Maastricht Treaty's attempted solution of European citizenship."

The Paradox of Vertical Integration

Antitrust policy and commentary include a persistent suspicion that vertical integration may increase market power in the integrated industries. The facet of this suspicion that economists have analyzed most is conveyed as follows. Suppose that a pure monopoly sells an intermediate good to the firms in a final product industry and that the monopolist acquires all of those firms. Since the firms in the final product industry have been combined, vertical integration has extended monopoly to a second industry. The integration does not improve production technologies or product traits in either industry nor reduce transaction costs, thus abstracting from any economies of integration. This paper concerns the paradox that economic models usually show vertical integration increasing economic welfare, in spite of the extension of monopoly, and even in the absence of any economies. Since economies would also enhance welfare, these models contradict the suspicion that vertical integration is harmful. In a recent survey of these models, Blair and Kaserman have commented that [o]n the basis of these results, the economics profession generally argued that the appropriate antitrust policy regarding vertical integration ... was conciliation at best or neutrality at worst [2, 2]. The only contrary result is in models where inputs are substitutable in final production: sometimes vertical integration reduces welfare.' However, in order to focus sharply on the paradoxical welfare result, this paper assumes fixed input proportions and ignores any economies of integration. Section I has a summary model that sets the stage for the succeeding analysis. The principal discovery of this paper is that the paradox is not in general valid, even for a simplified model. This discovery appears when the assumption of pure input monopoly, which is universal in the existing literature, is relaxed in section II. The new model includes situations in which integration reduces welfare, contrary to the usual result. These contradictory situations have strong implications for antitrust policy, because the analysis also shows that they ate the only kinds of situations that antitrust enforcers are likely to confront:

The Subject and Power

The ideas which I would like to discuss here represent neither a theory nor a methodology. I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects. The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire generale, philology, and linguistics. Or again, in this first mode, the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labors, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or, a third example, the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology. In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call "dividing practices." The subject is either