Mere Effort Research Articles

On the Limits of Historical Imagination

Over the last decades of the 20th century, the writing of history underwent serious political and epistemological criticism, especially in US academic circles. Yet it remained attached, by its origins, its academic structure, and its goals, to the nation and the state, as well as to unchallenged racial, ethnic, and identities. Over the same decades, however, a renewed idea of Europe-despite its flows and uncertainties-saw an interesting experiment in the conscious rewriting of histories and cultures, re-examining the 19th-century focus on the nation as the central plot of history.1 Almost four decades of documenting a common historical and cultural consciousness for might, in the long run, turn out to be a political and social failure. The constitutional challenge, rapid expansion, and the Turkey factor might in the end make the story of Europe an obsolete tale. Yet the mere effort, and, so far, its consequences in terms of peace, political stability, and economic progress make the effort to create an idea of a more appealing intellectual temptation than keeping untouched the craft of the national historian.Why has the idea of a European-like process of integration not been even remotely considered for and in North America? Can North America become a symbol of a different kind of relationship between Mexico, Canada, and the US, a relationship in which cultural particularities exist but which responsibly assumes a common past and a common future? What is certain is that maintaining civilizational differences-though in the short run intellectually comfortable and academically profitable-is particularly risky and undoable in the long term. The consequences of maintaining and nurturing assumed differences will affect the ' peace, stability, and good standards of living in the region. This is not only because of Mexico's growing inequality and uncertain economic and political future, but also because of the world's violent challenges and the vicious cycles in the US that blend inexorably-if irresponsibly-economic growth, immigration, all sorts of nativisms, notions of national security, and dangerous racio-cultural conceptions of the American identity.NORTH AMERICA: BASIC THESIS ON THE FAILURE OF A SYMBOLNorth America does not have a symbolic, cultural, political, or legal existence. Yet it is the gigantic economic and human fact within which Mexico, Canada, Central America, and the US live without ever discussing it. It resembles a gigantic statue of a medusa-like lady whose name has been lost by history but whose gaze we avoid, knowing that upon looking at those eyes we would see our own.North America has been a timid geographical mark that has paled in comparison to the clearly unconcealed map-not cartographical but moral and racial-known as America. North America has been a geography that is conventionally used in reference to the indigenous people of Canada, the US, and northern Mexico. North America is real when it is about native Americans, a pre-national reality. The cultural-racial dichotomy (Anglo vs. Latin), however, is conceptually mightier than the map of either America as a whole or that of North America as a complex but integrated geographical unit. As in a 19th-century history of civilization, the continent is divided into the nonsense of an and a part, as if such Anglo and Latin races, territories, and civilizations were first, real, and second, locatable in clearly defined cultural and geographical spaces. Three decades of post-new left, post-this and post-that historical and cultural criticism have only re-emphasized these essentials with endless excursions into cultural-racial-ethnical certainties.Today North America is an undeniable commercial and economic reality, though its benefits are still a matter of controversy after more than 10 years of NAFTA.2 Economic integration, however, is a fact that NAFTA only accelerated and institutionalized. …

Mere effort as the mediator of the evaluation-performance relationship.

The research traditions that have examined the evaluation-performance relationship do not agree on the mediating process(es), nor is there any compelling evidence that favors one account over the others. In the current research, a molecular analysis of performance on the Remote Associates Test was undertaken in an effort to identify the mediating process(es). This analysis suggests that the potential for evaluation leads participants to put greater effort into the prepotent response and that this mere effort alone can account for the typical finding that evaluation improves performance on simple items and debilitates performance on complex ones. Subsequent research will be aimed at testing the generalizability of this account.

Arbitrage and equilibrium in strategic security markets

In view of the fundamental price taking hypothesis, arbitrage is never compatible with equilibrium in Walrasian markets because the existence of an arbitrage opportunity in a competitive situation always leads to unbounded arbitrage activity. In strategic markets however, the mere effort of individuals to profit alters market clearing prices and thus distorts arbitrage opportunities as well. This observation suggests a different relationship between arbitrage and equilibrium, than in the competitive model. Indeed, we show that in such markets a spread between the cost of a portfolio and its returns is compatible with equilibrium. We provide an example of an equilibrium where a resourceless individual holds a portfolio with zero cost and positive return in every state. We further demonstrate via an asymptotic result, that no arbitrage is intimately related to price taking behaviour.

The integral diagnostic and intervention schema: Idis. A systematic approach towards consultations

In this chapter, we discuss social facilitation theory and research and highlight its interrelationships with social loafing. Work on social facilitation and social loafing proceeded along independent lines until the 1980s, when research (Harkins, 1987; Jackson & Williams, 1985; Sanna, 1992) suggested that loafing and facilitation are actually complementary effects. In both cases, evaluation is central. In social facilitation, working together enhances evaluation potential; in social loafing, working together reduces it. After presenting this unified model, we review research that examines the roles played by the three potential sources of evaluation that are present in these paradigms: the experimenter, coactors, and the self. Finally, we note that we are no closer now to identifying the process(es) that mediate(s) these evaluation effects than the investigators were when they began this work over 100 years ago. We present an account, mere effort (Harkins, 2006), identified through a molecular task analysis that may explain performance effects in these domains.

The role and characteristics of an emergency mission

Governed as it is by the very nature of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, an emergency mission is more than a mere effort to restore essential services. Although it is undoubtedly best characterized by the relief activities set in motion during the acute phase, its full scope cannot be measured without taking into account the preparatory and subsequent rehabilitation and development phases.Such a mission thus consists invariably of three stages: preliminary, in situ and follow-up.

New Technologies, New Skills

While managers tend to assume that the introduction of new technologies will result in a reduction of skill requirements, this is not always the case. On the contrary, there is often an upgrading effect. Using bank computerization as an example, this article shows that automation's effect is to push employees out of product fabrication, towards the periphery of a system of machines, and into interface and control functions. These conditions demand more responsibility as distinct from mere effort, more abstract reasoning as opposed to rote learning, and more carefully nurtured systemic interdependence as compared to the assemblyline type of sequential dependence. This article identifies the managerial challenges posed by these requirements.

I Can Speak

AIN: a night of submission, a morning of resignation. Is this life a mere effort at resignation? An endurance of wretchedness? Day after day, my youth is thus gnawed away; and happiness-I have found it in wretched quarters. My song having lost its voice, I lived in idleness in Tokyo for a while, and then, quietly, I began to write something-not a song, but as it were a 'murmur of life'; thus I was little by little led by my work to realize how my writing should proceed. 'Guess this is about the sort of thing. . .'-in this way I picked up a little something like confidence, and got started on the novel I had planned long ago. Last year, in September, I rented the second floor of a resting-house called 'Tenkajaya' on the top of Misaka Pass in Yamanashi Prefecture. From then on my work moved steadily ahead, finally coming to almost a hundred pages. The results didn't seem too bad even when I read them over. I gathered new strength. And one day when a strong wintry wind was blowing, I impetuously swore to myself that, no matter what, I would not return to Tokyo till I finished it. It was a stupid pledge. September, October, November came, and the cold weather at Misaka became unbearable. During those months, the lonely, depressing nights followed one after another. How I was tempted! Having so impetuously made a promise to myself, I couldn't go back on it now at this stage. Even though I wanted to run off to Tokyo, it would have been like breaking one of the Commandments. Atop the pass, I vacillated between two courses. I thought of -going down to Kofu. As Kofu was even milder than Tokyo, I thought maybe I could last through the winter. Down to Kofu I went. It did me good. My bad cough left me. I rented a sunny room in a lodging house on the outskirts of town, and tried the feel of sitting at

Learning Prevention First Hand

This study is in no way to be considered either a punishment or a mere effort to protect the hospital pocketbook. The general public has not yet absorbed the idea of prevention. The student is in contact with patients whose illnesses are largely the result of ignorance of preventive measures. Sometimes she sees very little preventive work and, if she does, usually does not apply its principles to herself. Her experience of life is really only beginning and, if we do not help her to correlate classwork on hygiene and prevention with her own and patients' illnesses, she looks upon that classwork as either an impractical dream or as something she visions herself using after graduation, and perhaps even then only if she specializes in public health nursing.

The Idea of Man and Knowledge in the Conception of Persian Mystics

The perplexing enigma of the cosmos and the creation has been from time immemorial a source of fascination for the human mind, and all the peoples of the globe, both those who have passed away and those still in existence, have striven to solve this riddle, either forming themselves into special groups for this purpose, or by mere individual effort. Of these solutions some were distinguished by a greater viability, a greater strength, and a greater ascendency, and are still exercising their sway; whilst others were short-lived and transient, were accepted by few people and, having soon disappeared, constitute now merely dead and cold fragments of human thought. Some of these solutions appealed more to the intellect, others were more felt by the heart.

What Mathematical Subjects Should be Included in the College Curriculum?

In the forenoon of this twentieth century, when democracy is asserting itself, no less in the political realm than against the old aristocracy of learning, we who are voluntarily yoked to the common load of teaching mathematics must realize its present state of unrest. Possibly this is not more noticeable in mathematics than in many other branches of the curriculum, and it is probably a bit less conspicuous in the colleges and universities than in the secondary schools; and furthermore, this unsettled condition is by no means confined within the walls of our American institutions, but its constant throbbing is felt in the educational pulse of every progressive country in the world. There seems to be an ever-present desire for a change without first counting the cost of the move; a mere effort to have things different, with no well-defined plan of having them better.