Popular Currency Research Articles

Environmental sustainability and comparative analysis in different segments of society

The harmonious interaction of society, environment and the economy forms the basis for sustainable development. Humanity has only just started to realize that we are responsible for the environment, which is significantly affected by mankind’s economic activities. Scientific input often plays a key role in matters of public policy, particularly those areas concerned with the impact of human activities on the environment. Scientific knowledge is called for not only in the design of effective problem-solving policies, but also in the identification of the problem itself. The term “sustainability” achieved popular currency in the Brundtland Report, which links environmental protection to global development and emphasizes the responsibility humankind has for future generations. The report defines sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This definition stresses intergenerational equality that requires a dynamic balance between maintenance (“sustainability”) and transformation (“development”). Although a high moral goal is presented, there is little guidance about how to achieve it. It is not only so-called „green” or organic products that should be promoted; rather, a complex vision of and attitude to creating products and services, which considers the interests of the environment, the economy and social interests as well. All societies are unique and have to draw up their own relevant economically viable and sustainable economic and social models. A thorough knowledge and understanding of the underlying social systems is essential for creating efficient practical solutions. The present paper focuses on the presence, efficiency and awareness of environmental sustainability in various segments of society.

Empirical Study of Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall Models with Heavy Tails

Expected Shortfall (ES) has been proposed as an alternative, almost coherent, risk measure to Value-at-Risk (VaR), as it considers expected loss beyond VaR. In this paper, we compare the performance of different models in estimating VaR and ES using historical data. Daily returns of popular indices (S&P500, DAX, CAC, Nikkei, TSE, and FTSE) and currencies (US dollar vs. Euro, Yen, Pound, and Canadian dollar) for over ten years are modeled with Empirical (or Historical), Gaussian, Generalized Pareto (Peak Over Threshold (POT) technique of Extreme Value Theory (EVT)) and Stable Paretian distribution (both symmetric and non-symmetric). Our backtesting results support the assumption of fat-tailed distributions of asset returns. Several computational issues and effects of factors, i.e. rolling window size and confidence level, are also addressed.

The Listening Cure: Listening for Culture in Intercultural Psychological Treatments

THE TALKING CURE Psychoanalysis, and the many forms of psychotherapy it has spawned, have come to be known as “talking cures.” While this term retains a popular currency, it was created in the early 1880s, many years before Freud elaborated his psychoanalytic method. As Freud’s mentor and collaborator Josef Breuer (Breuer, 1895) reported in his seminal case study of the patient “Anna O,” it was Anna who coined the term. According to Breuer, Anna suffered from a host of debilitating hysterical symptoms, including paralyses, deafness, visual defects, loss of speech, and hallucinations. These symptoms proved impervious to Breuer’s interventions until Anna noticed that when she “gave utterance” (Breuer, 1895, p. 29) to her symptoms in the presence of her doctor, they vanished. As Anna—who was quick to grasp the effectiveness of this new therapeutic technique—deliberately repeated this procedure, her symptoms disappeared. Although the talking cure is commonly attributed to Freud, it was Anna who not only gave it its name, but who was its “real discoverer” (Jones, 1961, p. 147). Indeed, during the period when Anna and Breuer were developing the talking cure, Freud, under the influence of French neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot, was treating hysterics with hypnosis. He did not hear of this case, or of the method it employed, until after Anna’s treatment had ended, and he did not implement his own version of the talking cure until 1889, seven years after its discovery (Jones, 1961). Intrigued by the psychological benefits of verbalization, and disenchanted with hypnosis, Freud began to work closely with

Democratisation and the Media

Studies of the relationship of the mass media and democracy either rely very heavily on American and European experience, or they are focused studies of national cases. There are relatively few attempts to generalise from the rich diversity of the last thirty years. This article is an initial attempt to compare the experiences of the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe with the various dictatorships of East and South East Asia. It is argued that, despite the fact that there are important differences between communist and capitalist dictatorships, it is nevertheless theoretically possible to compare the two categories. An outline theory of the relationship between media and social power in both is introduced. In comparing Europe and Asia, it is argued that oppositions between “Western” and “Asian” values are not at all useful, despite their considerable popular currency at the time of writing (September 2001). In both cases, key democratic values like reason and media freedom have a contradictory status that defies continental generalisations. The article continues with an examination of the decay of the undemocratic regimes in the two continents and points to their differences and similarities. In particular, it is noted that there are surprising similarities of outcome in the media democratisation process despite the differences in starting point. The absence of radical democratic movements in Europe is contrasted with their apparently greater prominence in some parts of Asia. It is speculated that the future in China will involve political crises that will provide further opportunities for radical democratic movements.

Begging the Question of Responsibility: The Vagrant Poor in Wordsworth's "Beggars" and "Resolution and Independence"

IN THE THIRD VOLUME OF A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE, DAVID HUME argues that the mind is characterized by a selfishness or limited generosity that is reinforced by nature's having made scant provision for our wants.(1) Justice, as the predicate of this limitation of the subject's interested affection, comes into being order that society should make greater advances acquiring possessions and avoid running into the solitary and forlorn condition, which must follow upon violence and an universal licence (492). According to Hume's hierarchical scale, affection begins with the self, descends logically to our relations and acquaintances, and culminates with the weakest [of our attention] reach[ing] to strangers and indifferent persons. Indeed, any contradiction these degrees of partiality--by enlargement or contraction of the affections--Hume deems both vicious and immoral (488). It is thus possible for Hume to envision singular acts of private justice that would be contrary to the larger public construct of justice. To illustrate the ruinous potential of singular justice, Hume at one point offers a specific scenario which an enlarged affection for the stranger violates justice: When a man of merit, of a beneficent disposition, restores a great fortune to a miser, or a he has acted justly and laudably, but the public is a real sufferer (497). By labeling the recipient of generosity a or seditious bigot, Hume disguises both the charitable act and the request which precedes it, making the motive for such singular justice as hard to envision as the circumstances which a miser loses and begs for the restoration of his fortune. Though it is at least possible to imagine particular cases which the courts would be asked to rule with regard to seized properties of misers and bigots, Hume's scenario depends more plausibly on the socially familiar example of giving to beggars. This implicit analogy suspends the request that begets and reads it instead as a miserliness associated with political sedition, presumably because begging would suggest an inadequacy the present social order. The configuration of miserliness and begging, though initially jarring its apparent contradiction, more likely reflects a popular currency, namely, stories which circulated to refute almsgiving. Writing some twenty years on the other side of the Wordsworth poems here to be considered and sixty after Hume, Charles Lamb would defend the practice of almsgiving against just such suspicion: Half of these stories about the prodigious fortunes made by begging are (I verily believe) misers' calumnies.(2) Inverting the implicit charge of miserliness by attributing the miserly intentions to the storytellers rather than their beggarly subjects, Lamb recounts a particular story, which appeared in the public papers some time since, about a beggar who when he died left all the amassings of his alms to a regular benefactor. As Lamb partly recognizes, the moral of this story may cut both ways--polemicizing against the real need of beggars by the fantastic assertion of accumulated, unused wealth, while still encouraging well-directed charity by offering benefactors a fantastic return on generosity and by further allowing the amassed fortune to signify the beggar's noble gratitude. In a different register, one that yet preserves the anxiety behind such stories, Hume imagines the recipient of generosity not as one who begs from real need, but as one who is preternaturally undeserving.(3) What Hume recognizes, perhaps only as an unwitting insight of his anxiety, is that excessive need is unreasonable, for the additional charge of bigotry implies that the metaphorically concealed beggar is also an enemy of reason and justice. If Hume's anecdote is riddled by a distorting illogicality which perceives the recipient of generosity as a threat to social order, what is less apparent is why singular charity, which Hume's time (as our own) was often associated with more conservative political views of the poor, is deemed so threatening. …

Contemplating the Communication State

REPORTING THE NATION'S BUSINESS: PRESS-GOVERNMENT RELATIONS DURING THE LIBERAL YEARS, 1935-- 1957. Patrick H. Brennan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. THE CULTURAL INDUSTRIES IN CANADA: PROBLEMS, POLICIES AND PROSPECTS. Ed. Michael Dorland. Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1996. RADIO CANADA INTERNATIONAL: VOICE OF A MIDDLE POWER. James L. Hall. Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1997. CLASH OF IDENTITIES: ESSAYS ON MEDIA, MANIPULATION, AND POLITICS OF THE SELF. Ed. James Littleton. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996. REWIND AND SEARCH: CONVERSATIONS WITH THE MAKERS AND DECISION-MAKERS OF CBC TELEVISION DRAMA. Mary Jane Miller. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996. A CANADA OF LIGHT. B.W. Powe. Toronto: Somerville House, 1997. FROM POLITICS TO PROFIT: THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF CANADIAN DAILY NEWSPAPERS, 1890-1920. Minko Sotiron. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-- Queen's University Press, 1997. Marshall McLuhan's reflections on the social influence of electronic media have been with us long enough that it is possible to forget their intellectual sources. McLuhan, a devoted reader of Harold Innis, developed further Innis's ideas of the social uses of and time and then gave them popular currency. His project was made possible in part because of a shift in the nature of academic work since Innis had taken up a canoe paddle to gather primary evidence about the Canadian fur trade. McLuhan believed that electronic access to information was as much for the use of scholars as for anyone else. The metaphors for which he became famous were laid over broad surveys of data, ideas and traditions that Innis simply did not have the time or resources to assemble. If Innis spent a lifetime kindling, stoking and tending the flames of a few influential ideas, McLuhan sent them up hourly like flares. There is nothing covert about these intellectual connections. In his introduction to Innis's Empire and Communication, McLuhan indirectly acknowledged that the senior theorist had been the first to describe the relations between media and social structure: [Harold Innis] never ceases to point to the action of visual or literate culture in commanding space, while stressing the fact that command over territorial usually goes with neglect of time, tradition, and stability.1 It was Innis, not McLuhan, who described in empirical detail the historical associations among states whose media were towards either time or space. States concerned with media biased towards time (such as parchment, clay or stone) were more likely to be characterised by a decentralised system of government, with relatively hierarchical social institutions. States that used media biased towards (papyrus and paper, for example) were characteristically more centralised in their governing structures, preferring less hierarchical social institutions. The practical combination and use of the relative biases of media helped account for the social origins of empires. After Innis, Canadianists and communications scholars were set on a track of mutual interests. The state's concern to bind space through the construction of a railway had been followed by ambiguous social outcomes. The transportation system that had been justified in the language of establishing national sovereignty was used, paradoxically, to transport American goods westward. In a development that Innis seemed to anticipate, the decision to create a national broadcasting system, along with other cultural policies, held a similarly contradictory prospect. Of all the developed nations, Canada has been the most eager to reserve a role for government in developing a national culture, yet few nations remain as politically and economically dependent on another nation for their cultural symbols. After Innis, Canadian culture (media content, if you like) could never again be seriously considered without a recognition of the influence of American media channels on that culture. …

The resurrection of the nursery witch: The return to popular currency of the homosexual‐causing mother

The resurrection of the nursery witch: The return to popular currency of the homosexual‐causing mother

Proverbs and Proverbial Allusions in Hittite

Previous articleNext article No AccessProverbs and Proverbial Allusions in HittiteGary BeckmanGary Beckman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Near Eastern Studies Volume 45, Number 1Jan., 1986 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/373154 Views: 12Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1986 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Sevgül Çilingir CESUR Hitit Kültüründe Kurt ve Kurt Adamlar, Tarih İncelemeleri Dergisi (Dec 2021): 465–496.https://doi.org/10.18513/egetid.1050197

Morality, Legality, and Dispute Processing: Auerbach's Justice Without Law?

In this vividly written book, Jerold S. Auerbach pushes us to explore the limits of law and to reconsider some very basic and age-old relationships between human values, individuals, and society. He raises far more questions than he answers, and not always those he means to raise, beginning with the question that is his title. These ultimate issues, both timely and timeless, are worth contemplating because they force us to clarify our expectations of law and legal institutions and to rethink our priorities for conserving or reforming society. Auerbach sets out to give us a history of nonlegalistic dispute settlement in the United States. He starts from a set of polemical assumptions that have had great popular currency in recent years: that the contemporary United States has reached a crisis of litigiousness that has overwhelmed its legal system; that its citizens are seized with uncontrollable greed and selfishness and bring every grievance great and small to adjudication without hesitation; that its courts have all but ground to a halt faced with this demand to participate in all the major decisions in the society; and that all phases of its social and political life have become hopelessly rigid and legalized and function barely if at all.I Having set up this straw man, Auerbach proceeds to argue that there is another way (a better way?). He takes us through a series of historical examples of communities that, at least for brief periods, dealt with their dis-

The North American periphery of Antique Vermont

Dr Marshall McKusick is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, USA. He and others have been concerned with the rise of antiquarian speculation in the United States, which is historically comparable to mound-builder theories of a century ago that gained great popular currency. Professor McKusick's book on the subject of the various speculations Atlantic voyages to prehistoric America, will be published early next year by the Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale.

A Critique of Worker Participation in New Zealand

The term 'worker participation' is popular currency within public, business and governmental circles at the present time. One might infer from the manner in which it is being hailed , in some countries, as a sort of industrial philosopher's stone, that the idea is a new one. However, even the most cursory examination of the literature will reveal that this is not the case. Worker participation is an idea which surfaced on many previous occasions, only to sink once again into relative obscurity. Perhaps the most recent strong manifestation of interest, prior to the present revival, is to be found in the ideas of the Guild Socialists.' Although there was something of a decline in the popularity of this philosophy after the 1920s, developments have continued apace in some countries until the present day. Nevertheless, in recent times there has been yet another upsurge in interest and publicity, curiously enough particularly amongst management. I use the term 'curiously' since one of the features of previous exponents of worker participation has been their classification amongst the ranks of the more left-wing elements of society, hardly a label to be used for most modern managements. How then are we to account for this upsurge of interest in worker participation? This is the question to which this paper will be addressed.