Modern Mainstream Research Articles

The Experience of Old Age in West Sumatra, Indonesia: Culture Shift and Cultural Consonance in the Modern Era

The past four decades have seen enormous social change in Indonesia as the nation continues to experience rapid urbanization and social pressures in the globalized economy that have led to tensions between traditional cultures and the modern mainstream around the nation. This cultural shift has been felt strongly in West Sumatra, a region of Indonesia inhabited almost entirely by members of the matrilineal Minangkabau ethnic group. While the traditional social values of the area remain strong, they are eroding, and the Minang are becoming more like other Indonesians in terms of their family structure, occupations, and lifestyle. This has had a significant impact on the experience of old age as social and culture change has affected the traditional matrilineal structures that supported and ensured care for the elderly in past generations. This paper will describe the ways in which traditional institutions accommodated older individuals and describe how these systems have changed in the present day. Case studies across generations will be presented to illustrate the ways in which traditional matrilineal social structures are, and have been, perceived in the context of aging. Further, the paper will describe what this means for the elderly and their families in terms of cultural consonance in today’s society, and discussion will focus on the changing experience of old age in a society in transition against a backdrop of rapid urbanization and modernization.

Are Residential Dwellers Marking and Claiming? Applying the Concepts to Humans Who Dwell Differently

Mitch Rose's paper in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (volume 30, issue 5, pages 757–771) arguing that dwelling involves acts of marking and claiming offers bountiful conceptual tools for understanding the dwelling experience. Here, I apply Rose's ideas to the modern residential dweller and use this application to assess Rose's claims. Specifically, the typical and mainstream modern home dweller is contrasted with several different empirical case studies of people who dwell differently, using alternative technologies, practices, and forms of organization in residential dwelling. These case studies are explored using the language of ‘marking’ and ‘claiming’ as put forth by Rose (pace Martin Heidegger) to illustrate what these concepts offer for understanding the experience of dwelling in a home. The observations of residential dwellers who dwell differently suggest that Rose's concepts do help to elucidate the dwelling experience, but that intellectual assistance from other sources, including classical and contemporary pragmatist thought and the work of Marcel Mauss on the relationship between action and thought as well as Paul Harrison's claims regarding relationality and variation in dwelling, helps to further develop Rose's abstract formulaic and connect the dots between conceptualization and the empirical experiences of residential dwelling.

The Vineyard of Verse

This review of scholarship on Jesuit humanistic literature and theater is Latin-oriented because the Society’s sixteenth-century code of studies, the Ratio Studiorum, in force for nearly two centuries, enjoined the study and imitation in Latin of the best classical authors. Notwithstanding this well-known fact, co-ordinated modern scholarship on the Latin poetry, poetics, and drama of the Old Society is patchy. We begin with questions of sources, reception, and style. Then recent work on epic, didactic, and dramatic poetry is considered, and finally, on a handful of “minor” genres. Some genres and regions are well studied (drama in the German-speaking lands), others less so. There is a general scarcity of bilingual editions and commentaries of many “classic” Jesuit authors which would, in the first instance, bring them to the attention of mainstream modern philologists and literary historians, and, in the longer term, provide a firmer basis for more synoptic and synthetic studies of Jesuit intertextuality and style(s). Along with the interest and value of this poetry as world literature, I suspect that the extent to which the Jesuits’ Latin labors in the vineyard of the classroom formed the hearts and minds of their pupils, including those who went on to become Jesuits, is underestimated.

GPU computing in discrete optimization. Part I: Introduction to the GPU

In many cases there is still a large gap between the performance of current optimization technology and the requirements of real world applications. As in the past, performance will improve through a combination of more powerful solution methods and a general performance increase of computers. These factors are not independent. Due to physical limits, hardware development no longer results in higher speed for sequential algorithms, but rather in increased parallelism. Modern commodity PCs include a multi-core CPU and at least one GPU, providing a low cost, easily accessible heterogeneous environment for high performance computing. New solution methods that combine task parallelization and stream processing are needed to fully exploit modern computer architectures and profit from future hardware developments. This paper is the first part of a series of two, where the goal of this first part is to give a tutorial style introduction to modern PC architectures and GPU programming. We start with a short historical account of modern mainstream computer architectures, and a brief description of parallel computing. This is followed by the evolution of modern GPUs, before a GPU programming example is given. Strategies and guidelines for program development are also discussed. Part II gives a broad survey of the existing literature on parallel computing targeted at modern PCs in discrete optimization, with special focus on papers on routing problems. We conclude with lessons learnt, directions for future research, and prospects.

Depicting a Life Less Ordinary: Fantasy as Evidence for Deconstruction in the Contemporary Film Biopic

This article evaluates the utilisation of fantasy in the contemporary, mainstream biopic as evidence for deconstruction from the classical generic form. By using Miss Potter (2006) as an illustrative case study, this paper interrogates the inclusion of fantasy in relation to wider trends in the biopic’s development. Drawing on James Walters’ definition of ‘interior fantasy’, I examine the representation of ‘real’ animated characters in Miss Potter that the central protagonist both talks to and interacts with. Through a combination of narrative and production analysis, I explore how and why fantasy elements are included in a film which, in all other aspects, represents a realist, albeit dramatised, depiction of the well-known British author Beatrix Potter. Central to this is a consideration of whether the use of fantasy conflicts with historical accuracy and factual account in portraying the subject’s ‘real-life’ story. It finds that the ‘interior fantasy’ as seen in Miss Potter ultimately represents an extension of the formal components typically associated with the biopic. More broadly, this article contributes to recent, revisionist critiques, by assessing the deconstructive tendencies of the modern mainstream biopic and re-considering its place within contemporary cinema.

What is the Problem with Neoclassical Price Theory?

The article seeks to focus attention on Neoclassical price theory, as one of the two problematic foundations of modern mainstream economics—the other being the theory of distribution. After outlining what is understood to be Neoclassical price theory and noting the various criticisms which it has been subject to from both within and without the school, the article proceeds to argue that its major flaws need to be understood as stemming from how it conceives of the formation of prices in the first instance. Specifically, the article argues that the basic problem with the Neoclassical theory of price is that it abstracts from both production and money in the first instance, such that when these are eventually brought back into the explanation of price it is done so in an inessential manner; one where production and money have no bearing on the findings of the analysis of price which excluded them.

Development and testing of a prototype straw bale house

This paper describes the research, development, construction and initial testing of an innovative low-carbon prototype house built using novel prefabricated straw bale panels. The use of straw as insulation provides an opportunity for value-added use of a widely available low-carbon co-product of farming. The research reported in the paper seeks to enhance the understanding and develop the modern mainstream acceptance and use of straw as a construction material in housing and other applications. The paper initially summarises development and construction of the panels and the house. Tests conducted on the panels and house reported in the paper include on-going durability assessment, fire resistance testing, acoustic transmittance testing, air permeability tests and thermal surveys.

News with a view: essays on the eclipse of objectivity in modern journalism

Modern mainstream journalism faces a very real disturbance of its foundational premise that credible news is gathered and articulated from an objective stance. This volume offers new examinations of how the traditional notion of objectivity is changing as professional journalists grapple with a rapidly evolving news terrain--one that has become increasingly crowded by those with no journalistic credentials. Examining historical antecedents, current dilemmas with objectivity, international aspects, and theoretical considerations, contributors makes the unique case that the journalist's impulse to hold onto objectivity, and to ignore the increasing amount of subjectivities to which citizens are attuned, actually contributes to the news media's disconnect from today's news consumer. By revealing how traditional journalism needs to incorporate post-objective stances, these essays stimulate further thought and conversation about news with a view in both theory and practice.

Proposed Synergies between Indigenous and Modern Systems of Environmental Education in Addressing Development Planning in Zambia

The study drew inspiration from the need to counteract the ensuing failures of
 modern systems in addressing development challenges especially at local level
 despite several efforts by government to invest resources in poverty reduction
 and general developmental interventions. The study identified the alienation of
 indigenous knowledge systems in the mainstream modern systems of Environmental
 Education (EE) and development planning as a compounding problem that accounted
 for development stagnation in the communities. This alienation created the gap in
 knowledge since modern systems were generally found to be inadequate in addressing
 developmental issues, particularly at a local level. The lack of local relevance of most
 modern systems justified the call for integration of indigenous systems.
 The study focused on the need to establish linkages between the modern and
 indigenous systems of environmental education and their influence on development
 planning in Zambia. In so doing, the study proposed an approach to remedy the
 alienation of indigenous systems in the mainstream processes of EE and development
 planning by suggesting a synergy between the two systems. The study involved
 an assessment of some inherent policies, strategies, processes, methodologies and
 perceptions about EE and development planning. It, therefore, largely dealt with non-
 concrete ideas to which the reader is introduced. This point is crucial in appreciating
 the main orientation of the study.
 Descriptive research design was applied with qualitative approaches. The respondents
 were purposively sampled and included government officers and other modern experts,
 NGOs, and traditional leaders. A comparative analysis of modern systems was further
 made through a global dimension where the Zambian modern system and that of
 selected foreign countries, Germany and Montenegro were reviewed.
 The study established that the approaches applied in environmental education and
 general nature conservation were related to the country’s guiding principles which also
 reflected the overall vision, where it existed. Furthermore, a number of environmental
 policy instruments were examined and the following were identified as the main
 instruments: Direct regulation, Indirect regulation, Self-regulation, and A combination of the above instruments.
 Proposed Synergies Between Indigenous and Modern Systems of Environmental Education
 From the study results, differences in perceptions of and approaches to environmental
 education were evident at both country and individual levels. For instance, while in
 Zambia, environmental education was a school subject, in Germany it was not but
 its ideals were generally incorporated in the teaching of all subjects. In Montenegro,
 too, there was no school subject called environmental education but the concept had
 greatly influenced the school curriculum such that emphasis was put on environmental
 content in all the subjects, focusing more on human-nature relationships.
 The study also showed that direct regulation had been prioritised in Zambia
 compared to self-regulation and this had a bearing on public participation in
 development decision-making processes which are largely carried out in the planning
 cycles. Varying perceptions were also identified at individual level among the modern
 experts interviewed both in Zambia and those from other countries. However, existing
 opportunities for synergy formulation at all levels were identified and based on these a
 synergy was suggested.
 Arising from the above observations the study recommended, among other things,
 that the modern systems should adopt a broadened approach that promotes direct
 contact with nature from a multi-dimensional perspective. This would also call for
 curriculum and planning systems review to create an enabling education policy
 and planning framework that would provide practical support to such an approach.
 The promotion of culture, which was identified as a storage device for indigenous
 knowledge, was also recommended to be prioritised.

Richard Owen and the sea-serpent

The well known naturalist, Richard Owen, had a career long engagement with monstrous creatures. In the 1830s he famously christened large fossil reptiles, Dinosauria. He investigated fossil marine reptiles as well as the giant moa. He also looked into the sea-serpents and sea monsters then drawing wide public attention. He actively collected letters and analyzed correspondence on the topic, consulted with the admiralty on reports of Royal Navy encounters and sightings, and commented in the public press. He concluded that such reports were based upon misidentifications of whales and other large marine mammals, and not run-ins with mythological creatures. His work on the sea-serpent shows that rather than discount the idea out of hand, a number of high profile naturalists were intrigued by monsters and attempted to understand what they were. His work is key to understanding the skepticism over monsters held by modern mainstream science. This skepticism opened the field to later amateur investigators.

Jewish Modern Orthodox Women, Active Resistance and Synagogue Ritual

In this paper, I argue that the passive resistance paradigm which has dominated the literature on women in conservative religion is limited and that traces of more active resistance can be found. Based on interviews with Israeli modern Orthodox women who are challenging their exclusion from synagogue ritual, I draw attention to the harsh criticism that they raise and their mobilization to change the status-quo, despite the disapproval of communal rabbis. Reflecting such activism on a wider scale, I also consider the case of Shira Hadasha, an Orthodox feminist congregation in Jerusalem known for its radical departure from mainstream modern Orthodoxy regarding its approach to women’s participation in Torah services. Through this study, I seek to contribute both to a better understanding of some of the feminist changes taking hold within modern Orthodoxy in Israel and to a wider perspective of the web of resistance among women in conservative religious traditions.

Exploring the compatibility of biomedical and psychological approaches to treating psychosis

The recent UK clinical guidelines for psychosis require an integration of biomedical and psychological treatment approaches that may present challenges to the structure and delivery of services. This review briefly outlines these two approaches before presenting arguments both for and against their compatibility. Although this discussion recognises attempts at integrating the approaches in modern mainstream services, it argues that their fundamental theoretical differences entail very different treatment methods, and often require conflicting demands of clients. Not only is this potentially confusing and unhelpful to the clients, but it also interferes with the goals and processes of each approach. Some of the main challenges to integration are discussed, and suggestions are made regarding the future direction of multidisciplinary treatments for psychosis. This review argues that an open, critical examination of existing professional models and practices is required to ensure that optimal service provision.

Theory, generalisations from cases and methodological maxims in evidence-based economics: Responses to the reviews by DiNardo, Guala and Kincaid

First, I wish to thank John DiNardo, Francesco Guala and Harold Kincaid for their very thoughtful and provocative reviews of Error in Economics. I do not want to hide my contentment with there bein...

The Intersubjective Turn and its Consequences for Economics Education

In some fields of social science research, there is evidence for an intersubjective turn. While, as a social science, economics was dealing with social phenomena which were expressions of intersubjectivity, it has often been interpreted in accordance with mainstream modern thinking in individualistic terms. Taking this intersubjective turn seriously, a normative dualism of intersubjective and individualistic attitudes shows up, which calls for a deeper analysis of situational, cultural and individual traits in order to explain social behaviour. This is not only because learning is influential in this respect, but also because economics education has — as a kind of value education — to reflect on the issue, and students have to be orientated towards this complex and dynamic field. This refers to the practical learning target of competent economic conduct as well as to theoretical learning targets of better general understanding with its socio-political implications.

Integrative endeavor for renaissance in Ayurveda.

Currently western medicine has assumed the central position in mainstream global healthcare. Openness to learn from contemporary disciplines of basic sciences, application of modern technology and further adoption of the evidence-based approach has helped western medicine gain its currently acknowledged position as mainstream modern medicine. Modern medicine has further developed forms of integrative medicine by developing interfaces with other systems of medicine, including traditional, complementary and alternative medicine. However, these developments do not seem to address all the problems facing global health care caused by overemphasis on pharmaco-therapeutic drug developments. On the other hand, Ayurveda which is founded on genuine fundamentals, has the longest uninterrupted tradition of healthcare practice, and its holistic approach to healthcare management emphasizes disease prevention and health promotion; if it opens up to incorporate emerging new knowledge into mainstream Ayurveda, and maintains fidelity to Ayurveda fundamentals, it will certainly provide a broad-based opportunity to address the majority of the problems that have emerged from global healthcare requirements. To bring these solutions to bear, however, it will be necessary to progress from the present “utilitarian ethos” to a “unifying ethos” for realization of medical integration.

“NO HISTORY TO SPEAK OF”: JEWISHNESS AND MODERNISM IN JOHN RODKER'S MEMOIRS OF OTHER FRONTS (1932)

This study argues that an important part of the relationship between modernist literature and the modern Jewish experience can be understood through an examination of the novel Memoirs of Other Fronts (1932), written by John Rodker, but published anonymously. It shows that Rodker, who had been associated with major figures of Anglo-American modernism throughout the 1920s, was engaged in a complex and often painful negotiation of identity that was not a simple use of modernist techniques nor a straightforward acceptance of modernist imaginings of “the Jew”. Rodker's indirect means of writing about his own Jewishness was the product of a particular social location: not being fully part of mainstream British society, nor of any Jewish community, nor, indeed, part of mainstream modernism itself. Such a location caused him to produce an image of himself as foreign and estranged, but allowed him, through his use of psychoanalysis, to see this condition as true of everyone in the period, creating a powerful and compelling portrait of Britain during and after the Great War as traumatized, sadistic and commodified. However, by making everyone into “Jews”, the way in which the “Jewishness” of actual Jews was defined was left unquestioned.

Sources of History for “A Psychology of Verbal Communication”

There is a standard version of the history of modern mainstream psycholinguistics that emphasizes an extraordinary explosion of research in mid twentieth century under the guidance and leadership of George A. Miller and Noam Chomsky. The narrative is cast as a dramatic shift away from behavioristic principles and toward mentalistic principles based largely on transformational linguistics. A closer view of the literature diminishes the historical importance of behaviorism, shows a prevailing "written language bias" (Linell in The written language bias in linguistics: Its nature, origins and transformations, Routledge, London, 2005, p. 4) in psycholinguistic research, and elevates some theoretical and empirical thinking of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries on language and language use to a far more important role than has heretofore been acknowledged. In keeping with the theoretical and methodological perspective of the present article, it is particularly appropriate that the German philologist Philipp Wegener be "given his due in the annals of linguistic sciences" (Koerner 1991, p. VI*). In his (1885/1991) Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (Investigations regarding the fundamental questions of the life of language; our translation), he began his philological research with the investigation of actual speaking in everyday settings rather than with analyses of purely formal structure. Moreover, he emphasized understanding language and localized this function in the listener. Compatible with Wegener's own investigations is another aspect of speaking that has been most seriously neglected throughout the history of research on the psychology of verbal communication. For him, as well as for Esper (In C. Murchison [Ed.], A handbook of social psychology, Clark University Press, Worchester, MA, 1935), the basic and primary genre of dialogical discourse was not ongoing conversation, but the occasional use of speech in association with other activities. Both Bühler (Sprachtheorie, Fischer, Stuttgart, 1934/1982) and Wittgenstein (Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical investigations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1958) have also emphasized the importance of the genre of occasional speaking. The article concludes with a discussion of historical shifts in the relationship between psychology and linguistics.

Efficiency Wages and Policy Relevant Macroeconomics

This paper presents a compact economic model of optimizing workplace behavior, an important but overlooked venue of exchange that provides the missing half of morale-centric efficiency-wage theory. First appearing in the formal literature more than 30 years ago, the great promise of efficiency wages was the microfounding of rational labor-price market rigidities that would rescue Keynesian macroeconomics from the mounting assault by New Classical theorists. That promise, obviously, has remained unfulfilled, contributing to the diminished role of wage rents in modern macro thinking. This paper delivers on the early promise of efficiency wages. In particular, it extends the economic method of optimizing, price-mediated exchange from the market-place to the workplace and enables the construction of intertemporal general workplace equilibrium and the Workplace-Marketplace Synthesis (WMS). Empowered by the more comprehensive analysis of efficiency wages, the WMS features endogenous wage market-rigidities that are sufficiently robust to support (temporary and permanent) involuntary job loss and is, as a result, more policy-relevant than the modern mainstream New Neoclassical Synthesis.

Review Essay: Poverty of Modern Mainstream Psychology in Autobiography: Reflections on A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Volume IX

Review Essay: Poverty of Modern Mainstream Psychology in Autobiography: Reflections on A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Volume IX

Theorising technology

Technology is central not only to such traditional economic concerns as economic growth, wealth creation and the alleviation of poverty, but also to wider societal issues ranging from climate change, globalisation and the organisation of work, through to education, the provision of health care, and the development of media and the arts. It follows that, whatever their particular interests, economists, as well as social scientists and policy makers more generally, are at some stage likely to have to reflect upon the nature of technology. There are many potential issues to consider and some of the questions that arise include: ‘What is meant by technology?’, ‘What different kinds of technology are there?’, ‘What is technical change?’, ‘How do the material and social aspects of technology cohere?’ and so on. Although economics would seem a natural site for addressing questions of this kind, the analysis of technology in its own right within the discipline has been held back in several ways. First, although technology has been the subject of sustained and in-depth analysis by earlier generations of economists (e.g. in the works of Marx, Schumpeter and Veblen), modern mainstream economics has tended to downplay the analysis of technology per se in favour of a ‘black-box’ approach that reduces technology to a production function and technical progress to something that can be represented by (and that occurs between) shifts in production functions (Rosenberg, 1982). Economists interested in the nature of technology effectively face a choice between looking back to the contributions of their forerunners or looking outside their own discipline altogether. While the former route has been taken by some in recent years, this has tended to be restricted to those working in the Schumpeterian tradition (Dosi and Grazzi, 2010; Perez, 2010). The latter route, drawing on the wider literature in technology studies has, as yet, not been followed by many in economics. While there are no doubt a variety of reasons for this, an important factor appears to be the relative inaccessibility of some of the classic texts in these fields (especially in the philosophy of technology – for example Heidegger's Questioning Technology). Similarly, throughout the range of disciplines concerned with the study of technology, particular theories of technology are often interspersed with more detailed accounts of specific technologies or local intellectual disputes of one kind or another, making the main ideas in these literatures difficult to place and penetrate for those without a background in the particular disciplines.