Logical End Research Articles

The Slipstream of Mixed Reality: Unstable Ontologies and Semiotic Markers in The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, and Mulholland Drive

Whereas first-generation theorists of virtual reality tended to regard simulated worlds as separate from real life, current trends in miniaturization, implants, wearable computers, and embedded sensors have shifted the emphasis to “mixed realities” mingling computationally intensive simulations with input from the real world. Contemporary films and novels have mirrored this trend, creating a blend of simulations mixed with everyday reality that Bruce Sterling has called “slipstream fiction.” To explore this phenomenon, we analyze three films that mix simulation with reality: The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, and Mulholland Drive. These films present themselves initially as murder mysteries, but this pose quickly gives way to even more serious concerns, about the ontological status of the represented worlds. The narrative configurations suggest that when death is no longer the plots' logical end point, storytelling techniques undergo significant transformation, subverting usual assumptions about chronology, subjectivity, and topology and requiring new interpretive techniques.

If a Radical Screams in the Forest, Will She be Heard?

This article analyzes the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of the controversy over logging Headwaters, an ancient redwood forest in northern California. It contends that the Chronicle’s fundamental way of representing reality and judging the legitimacy of claims is through favoring an instrumental over ethical rationality. It concludes that this logic ends up limiting the ways that the main actors (Earth First! and Pacific Lumber) and the controversy itself are framed. This impacts the discursive landscape that the Chronicle creates because those in what Habermas (1984) calls the ‘systems world’ are favored over those in the ‘lifeworld’. The Chronicle’s coverage ends up setting up a set of unwritten criteria that embrace particular values and practices as necessary in order to be taken seriously as a political actor or speaker in relation to this environmental issue. This results from various journalistic routines and frameworks employed for constructing knowledge and legitimating actors and voices.

The Hegemonic Discourse of Management Texts

Mainstream management texts seek to legitimize a social order in which certain power relationships are naturalized and seen as the logical end of a historical development. Also, the ideological basis of managerialism determines the nature of the managerial discourse in which some interests are privileged whereas others are marginalized. Because they promote a managerial ideology in which sectional interests are passed off as universal, management texts can be seen, at least partly, as instruments of propaganda.

Post-Logo

Post-Logo

Mercosur and Brazil: A European Perspective

Brazil is the core state of South America and sustains an alliance called Mercosur. Mercosur was the focus of much European attention during the 1990s, both politically and economically, attracting large amounts of investment to the region. Brazil has difficulties pursuing the Mercosur integration process to its logical end, with resistance coming from both developmentalist visions of the past and industrial interests in the present. Mercosur has drawn Brazil closer to the European Union, functioning well as an instrument of Brazil's external ambitions, though also exposing it to the risk of free trade with Europe. For both Mercosur and EU-Mercosur relations to remain useful to current Brazilian ambitions, they must remain short of achieving their final goals and linger in a prolonged state of negotiation. Some EU states also prefer this solution. After four years of preparations Mercosur entered into negotiations with the EU in 1999, and since then EU-Mercosur negotiations have passed through several dramatic phases, often influenced by international political and economic developments, both in Europe and in Mercosur itself. The current Mercosur economic crisis impedes further progress in integration and also delays the EU-Mercosur process. The election of Lula da Silva as president of Brazil is not expected substantially to change the course of Brazilian policies towards Mercosur and the EU, though, faced with the challenge of reviving Mercosur, the president might have to make difficult choices with regard to Brazil's own interests. Through an EU-Mercosur agreement Lula could resuscitate the Argentinian and Uruguayan economies, though this might be at a cost for Brazil. Will Brazil be willing to pay this price in order to preserve Mercosur?

Science and spirituality.

Although several articles in the October 2002 issue on Complementary and Alternative Medicine reflect the interest in spirituality that exists in the field, they appear unable to discuss it directly. One of the reasons for this may be that scientific medicine has its roots in a rift from spirituality. Before Western medical practice and research began to involve what was considered to be an unnatural curiosity about the human body, medicine was intricately involved with a person’s spirit or soul. It was during the 16th century in Europe that men began to commit the heresy of stealing dead bodies from graves and actually looking at bones, muscles, and organs. “Laws against dissecting human corpses began to relax during the Renaissance; as a result, the first truly scientific studies of the human body began.”1 The dissecting of bodies has become such a basic feature of medical school education, it may be difficult to imagine the historical sacrilege of this act initially. The Church condemned these “body snatchers,” contributing to Western medicine’s alienation from the spirit. Larry Dossey writes, From the sixteenth century on, mind has been progressively expunged from the phenomenal world. . . . Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. . . . The logical end point of this world view is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not-me; and I am ultimately an object too, an alienated “thing” in a world of other, equally meaningless things. 2 As an American Indian, I am aware of an entirely different tradition of healing that never split from spirit world. There is no difference, for example, between Navajo religion and Navajo medicine. American Indian medicine consists of spoken prayers, songs that are prayers, rituals, and instruments of prayer. Even herbal medicine comes with prayers for a person’s spirit. It is interesting to me that modern providers have recently “discovered” holistic medicine. It is something like the way Columbus “discovered” America. Suddenly our spiritual practices exist, though they have been practical for centuries. We also experience alienation as a byproduct of would-be spiritual genocide, what Eduardo Duran calls the “soul wound”: “The notion of ‘soul wound’ is one which is at the core of much of the suffering which Indigenous peoples have undergone for centuries.”3(p127) When modern public health and medical practitioners are able to talk about the spirit and understand what they themselves have lost, I think their wound will begin to heal. Perhaps then they can help the rest of us.

Finessing King Neptune: Fisheries Management and the Limits of International Law

The shared uses of the world's oceans includes a broad spectrum of activities. Ships routinely navigate off the shores of virtually every coastal nation and their activities run the gamut from fishing to commerce, recreation, navigation, and military activities - all of which rely on the principle of mare liberum, or freedom of the high seas. Regulating the activities of these many vessels, flying the flags of different sovereign states, on the high seas - the paridigmatic international commons - poses a unique set of challenges for the international legal system. Of these many challenges, managing the mobile fish stocks that straddle zones of national jurisdiction and the international commons is perhaps the most complicated. Managing these resources raises practical questions about who has the authority to make and enforce rules as well as more theoretical questions about the contours of a State's sovereignty over vessels flying its flags. Taken to its logical end, mare liberum implies a right to fish straddling stock to extinction. Each State has an equal right to exploit the resources of the high seas, and no State has authority to regulate the activities of another State's nationals on the high seas. States vary in their commitment to fisheries protection, and no State wants to disadvantage its nationals in the international arena. Unless international law devises a legal framework capable of imposing consistent conservation measures on high seas straddling stocks, mare liberum will drive these stocks towards extinction, either actual or commercial. This paper uses the interaction between the competing international norms of mare liberum and environmental stewardship in the context of high seas fisheries management to explore fundamental questions of sovereignty and of international law. In particular, I ask whether the fisheries management regime proposed by the 1995 Straddling Stock Agreement can solve this regulatory puzzle in a manner consistent with generally accepted notions of national sovereignty in an international context. In answering that question, I propose a new vision of high seas fisheries management, one that reconciles the apparent contradiction between mare liberum and environmental stewardship.

A physical map of the chromosome 12 centromere

While current sequencing efforts consider the detection of alpha satellite repeats as logical end points for map construction, detailed maps of most pericentromeric regions are lacking to confirm this hypothesis. Here we identify the different alpha satellite families present at the pericentromeric region of chromosome 12. The order, size and location of these repeats is established using radiation hybrid analysis, pulsed field gel analysis and FISH and the maps are integrated with current sequence information. For the different classes of alpha satellites present at the chromosome 12 centromere the paralogs in the human genome were mapped by FISH. Unique sequences flanking the alpha satellite repeats were identified, some of which are not represented in the current draft sequence. This mapping effort localises the different alpha satellite repeats within the pericentromeric region and anchors them in the current maps. The novel sequences identified may serve as the end point for the ongoing sequencing efforts.

Review Essay: The Kennedy Tapes

The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, the Great Crises. 3 vols. Edited by Ernest R. May, Timothy Naftali, and Philip D. Zelikow. New York: Norton, 2001. 1,882 pages, plus CD-ROM. Recordings of presidential meetings and telephone conversations can be both a blessing and a curse for scholars of postwar U.S. politics and diplomacy. On the positive side, the tapes provide a kind of time machine, enabling historians to listen in on the policy-making process as it unfolded. Researchers can discern emotion, idiosyncrasies, and the interplay of personalities in a way that written documents rarely permit. On the negative side, recordings can be maddeningly difficult to use. The sound quality is often poor, and many passages defy comprehension. Policy makers frequently wander from their agenda, making obscure references to names and events unfamiliar to researchers lacking encyclopedic knowledge. Often, too, individuals speak in broken or incoherent sentences, making the flow of conversation difficult to grasp. Fortunately, help is at hand. Since the mid-1990s, researchers at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs have been working to transcribe and annotate the White House recordings of all six presidents who made them between 1940 and 1973, a mammoth task that will take many years to complete. The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, the Great Crises, a three-volume set of books edited by Ernest R. May, Timothy Naftali, and Philip D. Zelikow, represents the first major step in that process. A landmark achievement, the books not only provide researchers with valuable new material from the crisis-filled year of 1962 but also leave no doubt that the entire presidential recordings project will be a major asset to scholars. The collection is not, of course, the first effort at transcribing presidential tapes and making them available to a broad readership. In 1997, May and Zelikow began the process by publishing The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, now a standard resource for students of the crisis. Michael Beschloss's two volumes of Lyndon Johnson's telephone conversations, published in 1997 and 2001, have similarly proved valuable to historians working across a range of foreign and domestic topics in the later 1960s. But May, Naftali, and Zelikow's new collection surpasses these earlier efforts in several respects. Most obviously, it is unprecedented in its completeness. The three volumes, more than eighteen hundred pages in all, contain the entire run of recordings between Kennedy's decision to install the taping system at the end of July 1962 and the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis three months later, a logical end point for the first set of books. Researchers can rest assured that the volumes contain every shred of tape that has been declassified for the period in question, including updated versions of all the material included in May and Zelikow's previous book. Indeed, the new collection now stands as the most authoritative version of the missile crisis tapes. The volumes are even more impressive for the effort that has gone into assuring accuracy. The project, under Naftali's day-to-day direction, used state-of-the-art sound equipment to increase the tapes' clarity, and as many as four members of the Miller Center's team of young scholars listened to each recording to reduce the chances of error. To be sure, readers will be disappointed by the abundance of the notation [unclear] inserted by the editors to indicate indecipherable passages. This unwelcome word appears as many as six or seven times on some pages. On the bright side, however, readers will draw confidence from this practice, which suggests the editors' obvious caution about introducing errors. Readers also can gain a sense of the collection's careful attention to accuracy by comparing its missile crisis transcripts with corresponding sections of May and Zelikow's 1997 book. …

Unmanning the homeland

This article traces some of the history of and logic behind the automation of weapons systems in relation to their planned deployment as an integral element of ‘homeland security’ in the US after the September 11th attacks. We focus primarily on unmanned combat air vehicles that have long been part of the Air Force’s R&D plans, but have now apparently found an event that justifies their production and deployment. What, we wonder, will be the effects on the urban landscape by using unmanned vehicles capable of ‘intelligently’ selecting a target and firing upon it, especially when the technology that allows these weapons systems to find the target as satellite coordinates relies on the same information technology that provides the infrastructure for ‘smart’ communities, and are already deployed in virtually all urban settings. By exploring the logic of speed and surprise that has driven the increased move toward and reliance on automated and intelligent weapons systems, we reveal how the arguments used in favor of developing and deploying such weapons systems also work as arguments against them. The technology that makes a weapons system intelligent, for example, also means that it has to be capable of choosing the wrong target, hence its ‘intelligence’. Similarly, the need to control the element of surprise has its logical end in the pursuit of the ultimate hidden vantage point, exemplified by the dark side of the moon. The technology and logic of the current ‘War on Terror’ fits neatly into already extant long–range military strategic planning, and could have a massive impact on the shape of urban environments in the immediate and distant futures.Cet article reprend en partie l’historique et la logique qui sous–tendent l’automatisation des systèmes d’armes dans le cadre de leur déploiement en tant qu’élément constitutif de la ‘séécurité de la patrie‘ aux Etats–Unis après les attaques du 11 septembre. Il se consacre surtout aux aéronefs de combat sans pilote qui font partie des stratégies de R&D de l’Air Force depuis longtemps même si, apparemment, ils ont dorénavant trouvé un événement justifiant leur production et leur déploiement. Quels seraient les effets sur le paysage urbain d’un recours à ces véhicules sans pilote capables de choisir ‘intelligemment’ une cible et de la viser? Et ce, en particulier si la technologie qui leur permet de trouver la cible sous forme de coordonnées par satellite s’appuie sur cette même informatique qui fournit l’infrastructure aux communautés ‘intelligentes’, celle–ci étant déjà installée sur quasiment toutes les scènes urbaines. En s’intéressant à la logique de rapidité et surprise qui a motivé la tendance croissante et la dépendance à légard des systèmes d’armes automatisés intelligents, l’article révèle comment les arguments favorables au développement et au déploiement de ces systèmes fonctionnent aussi comme arguments contraires. La technologie qui rend intelligent un tel système signifie, par exemple, qu’il doit être capable de choisir la mauvaise cible, donc son ‘intelligence’. De même, le besoin de maîtriser l’élément de surprise trouve sa fin logique dans la recherche de la position cachée optimale, caractérisée par la face cachée de la lune. Technologie et logique de la ‘guerre’ actuelle contre la terreur s’adaptent parfaitement aux plans stratégiques militaires de grande envergure déjà en place et pourraient avoir une incidence énorme sur la conformation des environnements urbains dans un avenir à la fois immédiat et lointain.

On So-called Triplication in Colloquial Singapore English and Thao: A Response to Blust

A morphological pattern originally exemplified by forms from Thao, an aboriginal language of Taiwan, finds further exemplification in Colloquial Singapore English, and resultant theoretical clarification. ********** 1. INTRODUCTION. In his richly documented analysis of aspects of the semiaffixal (1) morphology of Thao, Blust (2001) identifies the following morphological processes: (1) (2) CA- and (3) rightward reduplication. These processes are grouped together under the traditional taxonomic label and various combinations of them are referred to by him as reduplication, and quadruplication. B holds the view that whereas is not a unified morphological process, is, and he proceeds to offer some insightful observations on the domain and interpretive limitations of the latter. The main point of B's paper therefore is to argue for the existence of and to suggest some of its possibly universal properties. In this response, we argue that (1) although B deserves credit for recognizing the purely morphological nature of the processes listed above, his analysis seems to suffer from a confusion between morphological processes and the patterns that result from the operation of these processes. The revisions made necessary by the removal of the confusion inadvertently introduced and nurtured by B, we shall argue, in fact constitute improvements. In order to avoid problems of the sort B creates for himself, we shall use terms like to describe specific patterns of morphological marking that result from an appropriate application of the morphological processes identified above. The derivation of these patterns is, in other words, an entirely different kettle of fish (we shall return to the matter later in this response). (2) (2) His very interesting empirical findings regarding the nature of triplication are, unfortunately, not given any theoretical grounding; they merit serious attention and, we believe, when pursued to their logical end, lead to some important conclusions regarding the relationship between iconicity and reduplication as a pattern of morphological marking, derived, we remind the reader, from an application of any one of the processes identified above. (1) and (2) are related in that, as we shall see, B claims that triplication only occurs with verbs. For this purpose, his claim that reduplication, by which he means derivations requiring two unrelated (333) morphological operations, does not count as triplication is important because the sort of derivational history it entails is apparently not needed for verbs, but only for numerals. In our response, although we will argue against B's attempt to separate serial reduplication from triplication, we will attempt to preserve his insight that there is indeed a special relationship of iconicity involving triplication (= a pattern, we repeat, obtained by more than one application of a reduplication process or by application of two distinct reduplication operations/processes) and verbs. In section 2, we provide a brief review of B's work. This is followed in section 3 by a presentation of data from Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), (3) an analysis of which we believe contains implications for B. Section 4 contains a number of speculations on the nature of the kind of iconicity involved. 2. BLUST 2001. According to B (drawing on Chang 1998), there are three major reduplication processes in Thao: CA- and rightward reduplication. (4) Table 1 includes some of the examples he gives of each of these processes. While the term full is used, consonant codas are actually invariably omitted so that the reduplication is in fact slightly less than full. More relevant for the discussion here, however, is the fact that reduplication may operate on either verbs (to signal repetitive or continuative aspect) or adjectives (to signal intensity) (Blust 2001:325). …

"Snug Stored Below": The Politics of Race in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers

Due to the poor reception of Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntley, and Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown gave up the novel in the early 1800s, and began a short but infamous career as a Federalist pamphleteer. His 1803 political tract, An Address to the Government on Cession of Louisiana to the French, is an allegory of a nation exposed to duplicitous outsiders. The tract is a consummate example of Federalist propaganda, a fictional letter written by an imaginary French official, who claims that the United States, torn by factionalism and discontent, is ripe for the pickings. Brown draws from his experience as a novelist to invent a wild tale of an impending slave insurrection that awaits the final order from France. Published after the discovery of ex-slave Gabriel Prosser's plot to attack Charleston, the pamphlet further convinced Americans of the truth of their longstanding fear--the French were going to use a proxy army of disaffected slaves to attack the United States. (1) Brown's pamphlet was part of a larger nationalist discourse in the early nineteenth-century that increasingly came to view the racial divide in the United States as impassable. (2) Brown reiterates an ideology over which Thomas Jefferson brooded about in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1784. The differences between the two races were fixed in nature, Jefferson wrote, and to free the slaves without a plan for expatriation, to let ex-slaves live alongside their former masters, would fill those of African descent with ten thousand recollections ... of the injuries they sustained. (3) A plan for deporting free African-Americans to Africa became even more urgent after the abolishment of the slave trade in 1807. Far from initiating the gradual death of chattel slavery by cutting off its lifeblood, the moratorium on the slave trade simply gave rise to a domestic slave market. In addition, new technology further strengthened the institution of slavery. Southern planters and northern investors purchased land and slave labor to take advantage of the cotton gin and a hardy upland cotton hybrid, and in the process, they created an internal slave trade far more productive and lucrative than the triangulation between Africa, the West Indies, and the United States. When James Fenimore Cooper began writing novels in 1819 the resurgence of slavery had already begun to define the limits, logic, and rhetoric of a democratic politics. Nationwide African-American resistance to an entrenched slave system led political leaders on a search for a mechanism that would both stabilize the planter's property in the South and neutralize the political agency of free African-Americans in the North. A group of prominent white citizens provided an answer in 1817, with the inauguration of the American Colonization Society. Taking Jefferson's theory of a fatefully segregated society to its logical end, they devised a plan to relocate free African-Americans to a new African colony. The American Colonization Society immediately became the key instrument of racial reform in the United States. By voicing a homogeneous American identity, it gave the nation an opportunity to resolve its central racial, and thus political, contradiction through the expatriation of African-Americans to Africa rather than amending the Constitution. (4) As a catalyst for a nationwide conversation about the relationship of race to constitutional liberty and citizenship, the colonization movement rehearsed a looming political debate about the future of slavery and democratic liberty in the United States. In 1819 Congress began to redefine the slave system, and after two years of strife between northern and southern representatives, they ended what had become known as the Missouri controversy with an ominous compromise. Admitting Maine into the union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, legislators completed the agreement by drawing a geographical line along 36[degrees]/30[degrees], a barrier that forced slavery south of the line and forecasted the coming of Civil War. …

Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age (review)

Reviewed by: Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age Michael C. Barnhart Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age. By Peter D. Hershock. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 308. Perhaps one of the most interesting, paradoxical, and—in Peter Hershock's way of thinking, in Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age — predictable aspects of the digital "revolution" is the degree to which information technology becomes less a means to an end and more an end in itself. Take, for example, the humble phenomenon of the "techno-bore." Such people, having acquired some new electronic gizmo, spend all their time talking about the thing, especially savoring such conversations with like-minded techno-bores, who go on in equal and endless length about their latest toys. Rather than becoming a tool for organizing one's affairs, the digital assistant becomes one's main affair. Or, consider the case of the Internet. Although the "Web" is supposed to put us in touch with each other, say, by making e-mail possible, we find ourselves either unable to cope with the avalanche of mail that comes over the portal and thus unable to respond to it all (or at all), or we spend much more time on our mail than we ever did, thus making the mail itself a nuisance and consequently much less useful than formerly. Of course, none of this is unique to computers and the digital workplace. The same complaints have been voiced in regard to cars, television (and radio, too), modern medicine, and industrialization—in fact, the whole gamut of innovations that we label "technology." Indeed, although information technology is Hershock's main target, it represents only the perfection of a form that has been developing for some time and which he often refers to with the phrase "technologies of control." That is, cars, televisions, blenders, can openers, and computers are tools that are put to use in order to make our lives easier; they accomplish this purpose by putting some element of the world, some range of things, more directly under our control and, importantly, by limiting our involvement with them as well. We make things more tractable, more subject to our wanting (as distinct, Hershock says, from our desiring, which involves an element of respect for the desired), and thus more an extension of ourselves rather than obdurate and resistant things. For example, insofar as a sledgehammer makes breaking rocks easier, it makes rocks and their sizes and shapes more a function of our will, less a reflection of their nature, and distances us also from the material thing. To touch a rock with one's hands is an entirely different experience, a much more intimate experience than touching it with a hammer. In a curious way, says Hershock, the rock becomes more "iconic." In other words, it becomes more representation—our representation—and less a thing-in-itself. The computer and its screen "icons" simply push this envelope to its logical end, reducing all things to "buttons" that can be pushed at will, as our wants dictate. [End Page 414] The more things become iconic, the more they become an extension of our will. But the more they become an extension of our will, the more they become "us." That is, insofar as I successfully "technologize" my world, the more my world becomes simply a reflection of what I want. The situation is not so different from that of the absolute dictator who purges all dissenting voices from his or her realm. The realm becomes the leader—Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, for example. And as we well know from Orwell, such power corrupts absolutely and completely, corrupts both the ruler and the ruled, reducing citizens and ruler to an infantile level. Two related phenomena attend such a development, Hershock tells us: narcissism and nihilism. We become more narcissistic because we become more obsessed with our wants as a reflection of our world. We become more nihilistic because our world of wants is intrinsically meaningless: it reflects what we want, not why we want it, no larger purpose. In short...

Childbirth advice literature as it relates to two childbearing ideologies.

Childbirth advice literature as it relates to two childbearing ideologies.

Trigonometry of spacetimes: a new self-dual approach to a curvature/signature (in)dependent trigonometry

A new method to obtain trigonometry for the real spaces of constant curvature and metric of any (even degenerate) signature is presented. The method encapsulates trigonometry for all these spaces into a single basic trigonometric group equation. This brings to its logical end the idea of an absolute trigonometry, and provides equations which hold true for the nine two-dimensional spaces of constant curvature and any signature. This family of spaces includes both relativistic and non-relativistic homogeneous spacetimes; therefore a complete discussion of trigonometry in the six de Sitter, minkowskian, Newton--Hooke and galilean spacetimes follow as particular instances of the general approach. Any equation previously known for the three classical riemannian spaces also has a version for the remaining six spacetimes; in most cases these equations are new. Distinctive traits of the method are universality and self-duality: every equation is meaningful for the nine spaces at once, and displays explicitly invariance under a duality transformation relating the nine spaces. The derivation of the single basic trigonometric equation at group level, its translation to a set of equations (cosine, sine and dual cosine laws) and the natural apparition of angular and lateral excesses, area and coarea are explicitly discussed in detail. The exposition also aims to introduce the main ideas of this direct group theoretical way to trigonometry, and may well provide a path to systematically study trigonometry for any homogeneous symmetric space.

Keith Devlin, Goodbye, Descartes: The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind

Keith Devlin, Goodbye, Descartes: The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind

Energy decay and steady states in externally driven magnetohydrodynamic systems

Some relaxed magnetohydrodynamic states of a plasma, such as the Taylor or the Alfvén state are often presented as the logical end of the plasma evolution by an argument of energy minimization under some constraint. However, these arguments are unsatisfactory and the very existence of nontrivial steady states as limits of magnetohydrodynamic evolution is far from obvious. For steady solutions to exist, the forcing term must be time-independent, it is shown that in this case, either the plasma undergoes constant change at a positive minimum rate or it comes arbitrarily close, in the quadratic mean norm, to the set of steady solutions of the magnetohydrodynamic equations.

The turmeric effect

The Turmeric Effect created by the successful opposition of a US patent on Turmeric by CSIR, India, has made its name known not only amongst the millions of common Indian people but also all over the world for its capabilities and expertise in taking up this techno-legal issue to its logical end and by showing to the world that, the India can take on any such complex issue at any international platform, like the present case which has been handled at one of the strongest and exemplary Patent Offices in the world USPTO. This case, very clearly, brings out the weakest links in one of the strongest patent systems and at the same time attempts to allay fears of those who think that once India fulfils its obligations as committed under WTO by amending its IP laws by 2000, the country would be forced to play on an uneven playing field and that the developed world would take advantage of the IP system under WTO. Starting with a brief introduction to turmeric, this paper traces the various developments beginning with the genesis of the re-examination proceeding initiated against the US Patent No. 5401504 on turmeric and then focussing on how this issue was successfully litigated by CSIR. The article emphasises the importance of a very thorough search of the existing disclosures, both patent and non-patent, in dealing with the patentability of aspects of the use of traditional products. Some such disclosures may be very old or in particular languages, but nevertheless highly relevant.

Technological acquisition and investment: lessons from recent indian experience

Most of the existing studies on investment functions ignore the role of technology acquisition in influencing investment decisions. This study argues that technology acquisition will decisively influence investment behavior, modernization, and expansion plans of firms. However, capability of the firms to acquire technology differs considerably. Following the Schumpeterian paradigm, we maintain that the entrepreneur's decision to invest and expand would depend on the technological opportunities available. The main role of the entrepreneur in the Schumpeterian framework is to exploit an invention or new technology in introducing new processes and products. The policy regime in India prior to 1985 did not permit the firms to take advantage of technological opportunities created abroad in introducing new technologies and expanding their capital base. The reforms introduced since 1985, for the first time, permitted the Indian firms to expand their product range, introduce new technologies, and increase their capacities without obtaining prior official sanction. This study, therefore, examines the role of technology acquisition in influencing investment decisions of private corporate firms in the aftermath of Indian economic reforms introduced in 1985. Using pooled cross-section data for 1987-88 to 1989-90 on a sample of 325 large corporate firms from seven industries, the present study examines the interfirm differences in investment behavior. The focus is on the impact of the first phase of economic reforms introduced in India post-1985. The model specified in the study postulates that acquisition of new technology made possible by economic reforms brings down costs and boosts demand. This increases the profit rate for firms using new technology. Technology acquisition per se takes place through technology imports via licensing or arms-length purchase of technology through the market, intrafirm transfer of technology by way of foreign direct investments, and direct import of capital goods embodying new technology. The process is facilitated by R&D expenditures. Empirical tests of the model carried out for each industry separately indicate that interfirm differences in the investment rate at the firm level are due to a number of factors. Opportunities to import machinery and license technology through arms-length purchase of technology influence the investment rate positively as these expenditures promote acquisition of technology. In other words, a government policy aimed at discouraging technology imports would also deter the growth of firms. Government policy before 1985 did hinder technology imports. This was partly to protect indigenous technology and partly to conserve foreign exchange. The results of the study further show that in-house R&D expenditures promote capacity expansion. This is despite the fact that most sample firms had small R&D budgets. Firms with R&D units are better placed to locate new technology and adapt it to suit Indian market conditions. This facilitates exploitation of technological opportunity leading to expansion of capital stock. However, the ability of a firm to exploit technological opportunities depended, to a considerable extent, on the age of its plants and machinery. This is because firms with older machinery and plants find the switch to new technology more difficult as most of their equipment and machinery are not suitable for modernization. The results of the study show that firms with machinery of recent vintage modernize and expand their capital base, using new technology, since it is easier for them to make the change. These empirical results have several policy implications for decision-makers in both the public and private sectors. The policymakers can draw inferences about the positive impact of the economic reforms on the capacity expansion and growth of firms. This, perhaps, provides a justification for taking the reform process to its logical end. Because economic reforms facilitate technology acquisition and capacity expansion, decision-makers ought to initiate the reform process in other spheres where it is yet to commence. Furthermore, modernization of plant and machinery and technology acquisition are a continuous process. The cost of modernizing a plant with dated machinery will be very high as older, outdated machinery is not compatible with the current vintage. An upgrade, therefore, is difficult if not impossible. Interruption of a technological upgrade due to changes in government policy ranging from total ban on technology imports to liberal import policy would enhance the cost of technology acquisition. The empirical results also indicate that even modest R&D activities facilitate the identification, location, and importation of relevant technology. Thus, firms with in-house R&D units grew faster. In countries like India, vigorous encouragement of R&D ought to be on the policy agenda of both corporate and government policy framers. Though our sample deals with Indian firms, it has relevance for other countries, because in most countries higher growth rates are being registered in industries that have been experiencing rapid technological development with better technological opportunities. Further, in a given country, firms that went in for acquisition of new technology invested more.

Goodbye, Descartes: the end of logic and the search for a new cosmology of the mind

Goodbye, Descartes: the end of logic and the search for a new cosmology of the mind