Present Incarnation Research Articles

Trajectories of AI technologies: Insights for managers

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has long been considered a technology for the future. With the release of the chatbot ChatGPT 4, many now feel the future has arrived. Long in gestation, this new technology promises many benefits to humankind, but worries persist that as AI technology scales and comes to rival or exceed human intelligence, the servant may become the master. Amid such hyperbole, the more nuanced trajectories of this technology have been neglected. In this article, we use the Trajectories of Technology (ToT) framework developed by Berthon and colleagues to explore the disparate paths that AI has taken and will take in the coming years, especially in the form of chatbots. This framework provides managers with a conceptual tool to strategically plan for the enormous promises and perils of AI in general and of chatbots specifically.

China’s Sin City

From the arrival of Portuguese colonialism to its present incarnation as the world’s biggest gambling center, Macau has long made the most of its liminal position at China’s edge.

Parametric waveform synthesis: a scalable approach to generate sub-cycle optical transients.

The availability of electromagnetic pulses with controllable field waveform and extremely short duration, even below a single optical cycle, is imperative to fully harness strong-field processes and to gain insight into ultrafast light-driven mechanisms occurring in the attosecond time-domain. The recently demonstrated parametric waveform synthesis (PWS) introduces an energy-, power- and spectrum-scalable method to generate non-sinusoidal sub-cycle optical waveforms by coherently combining different phase-stable pulses attained via optical parametric amplifiers. Significant technological developments have been made to overcome the stability issues related to PWS and to obtain an effective and reliable waveform control system. Here we present the main ingredients enabling PWS technology. The design choices concerning the optical, mechanical and electronic setups are justified by analytical/numerical modeling and benchmarked by experimental observations. In its present incarnation, PWS technology enables the generation of field-controllable mJ-level few-femtosecond pulses spanning the visible to infrared range.

The Conservatives’ Economic Strategy

The Conservatives’ Economic Strategy

Research on the strategy of intelligent analysis to improve sports person psychological experience in the era of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an excellent potential technology that is evolving day-to-day and a critical avenue for exploration in the world of computer science & engineering. Owing to the vast volume of data and the eventual need to turn this data into usable knowledge and realistic solutions, artificial intelligence approaches and methods have gained substantial prominence in the knowledge economy and community world in general. AI revolutionizes and raises athletics to an entirely different level. Although it is clear that analytics and predictive research have long played a vital role in sports, AI has a massive effect on how games are played, structured, and engaged by the public. Apart from these, AI helps to analyze the mental stability of the athletes. This research proposes the Artificial Intelligence assisted Effective Monitoring System (AIEMS) for the specific intelligent analysis of sports people’s psychological experience. The comparative analysis suggests the best AI strategies for analyzing mental stability using different criteria and resource factors. It is observed that the growth in the present incarnation indicates a promising future concerning AI use in elite athletes. The study ends with the predictive efficiency of particular AI approaches and procedures for further predictive analysis focused on retrospective methods. The experimental results show that the proposed AIEMS model enhances the athlete performance ratio of 98.8%, emotion state prediction of 95.7%, accuracy ratio of 97.3%, perception level of 98.1%, and reduces the anxiety and depression level of 15.4% compared to other existing models.

REA, Triple-Entry Accounting and Blockchain: Converging Paths to Shared Ledger Systems

The concept of shared ledger systems offering a single source of truth has repeatedly called traditional bookkeeping into question. Improving upon the long-standing double-entry systems, solutions such as the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) accounting framework, triple-entry accounting (TEA) and blockchain have been advanced. However, to date, the historical development of shared ledger systems remains murky. This paper conducts a genealogical analysis of shared ledger systems, in particular tracing the development of REA, TEA and blockchain. We show how the REA framework had a distinct influence over independent streams of research in the field of TEA, and how this interaction may be traced to the present incarnation of shared ledger systems in blockchain. In doing so, we duly acknowledge the influence of each individual contributing to this development, correct common misconceptions and map out how the paths of REA, TEA and blockchain overlap in the realm of shared ledger systems.

Dominium and The Empire of Laws

Civic republicanism endorses a freedom ideology that can support the corporate social responsibility movement [CSR] in some of the challenges it faces. This article is a call for CSR to embrace this normative guidance as a superior alternative to mainstream liberalism. Part I is the introduction. Part II discusses the institutional changes that gave rise to CSR’s present incarnation. Part III builds upon this discussion, explaining how corporate risk management strategies pose a threat to CSR’s persuasive authority today. It then considers CSR’s options for enhancing governance when such persuasive authority is not available. It determines that inspiring integrity – above all else – is integral to success and that, in turn, the removal of moral distance is key to inspiring such integrity. It also notes that whether a form of coercive authority exists or not to back a governance mechanism, the removal of moral distance will be key to its effectiveness. Part IV notes that efforts to remove moral distance have been attempted since the 1970s, but time has proven that business actors have been resilient to meaningful change. It argues that this failure to reduce moral distance is, in part, the result of mainstream liberalism, which continues to nullify such efforts to make business actors feel more accountable for the impacts of their decision-making. It then explores liberalism, detangling the meaning of possibly the most contested, and normatively powerful, concept from the twentieth century to the present. Part V explains civic republicanism. It then explores civic republicanism’s conceptual proximity to liberalism. Part VI makes the case for why civic republicanism ought to amend the liberal message, recasting the rights and responsibilities of both imperium (that is, the authority of the sovereign) and dominium (that is, the private authority usually emanating from property and contract) within society. Part VII concludes with a short reflection on the ground covered.

O brother how art thou: Propensity to report self-assessed unmet need

Research investigating self-assessed unmet need (SUN) has taken the reports from surveys as given and subsequently attempted to discover patterns in inequality of access to healthcare. This requires the yet untested assumption that, given a certain level of care and demand, the likelihood of reporting unmet need does not vary across socioeconomic/demographic status (SEDS), be satisfied. Using an administrative dataset spanning 2001 to 2011 comprised of sufferers of a set of conditions that suggest unmet need (n = 3300) we evaluate the proposition that, given health status and care received, the propensity to report unmet need does not vary along SEDS. The results are further validated using the Canadian Community Health Surveys between 2001 and 2013 (n = 237,483). We find that the assumption of independence between reporting SUN and SEDS is not satisfied. Many of the groups found to have less access in previous studies may simply be more prone to interpret/answer the survey questions about unmet need in a certain way. The results of this research suggest that, in its present incarnation, survey data on self-assessed unmet need does not accurately measure what much of the academic literature has assumed it does.

The Afterlife of Uncle Tom

ABSTRACT Uncle Tom's fall from grace took almost a century. Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was immediately adapted into stage productions, which foregrounded Tom's humanity. But the high regard in which most people held Tom began to change in the late nineteenth century, when members of the Black audience began to see him as representative of an “Old Negro” type. The twentieth century multiplied the venues in which Tom appeared, but it also witnessed the further erosion of Tom into his present incarnation as an intraracial epithet. This is the story told by Adena Spingarn in her richly researched book, Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitor. Although Spingarn's book smooths out some of the interpretive lumps of Uncle Tom and Uncle Tom's Cabin, its simplifications are compensated for by the artifacts it unearths and the attention it pays to the reception of Uncle Tom by a changing Black audience.

Review of The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution; The Islamic State: A Brief Introduction; and The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State

These and other questions are addressed in three publications: The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution, by Patrick Cockburn; The Islamic State: A Brief Introduction, by Charles R. Lister, and The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State, by William McCants. Each of them traces the origins of the Islamic State from its earliest days when Abu Musab al Zarqawi founded it to its present incarnation under the leadership of an Islamic scholar, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and attempts to clarify the nature of ISIS.

Toronto Turns Forty

B. Ruby Rich reviews the fortieth edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, taking stock of TIFF from its origins to its present incarnation.

Envy in Neoliberalism: Revisiting Veblen’s Emulation and Invidious Distinction

:Cautionary tales admonishing against the evils of envy crowd religion and folklore across cultures. Pre-capitalist societies attempted to suppress envy, and familial and community relations held the emotion of envy in check through social sanctions. Capitalism, however, encourages envy. The connection between capitalism and envy is not new. Thorstein Veblen (2007) methodically addressed it in his explanation of invidious distinction and emulation. As capitalism has evolved into its present incarnation of neoliberalism, however, envy has also evolved. The evolution, nature, and role of envy within neoliberalism must be studied in order to understand more fully its consequences. This research seeks to examine the social ontology of envy. According to advocates of neoliberalism, inequality serves an important social function: It is the great motivator, without which individuals would not have incentives to improve. Inequality and — by extension — envy are thus heralded as the prime catalysts of economic activity.

Book Review: Ronald J. Berger and Richard Quinney, Storytelling Sociology: Narrative as Social Inquiry

Book Review: Ronald J. Berger and Richard Quinney, Storytelling Sociology: Narrative as Social Inquiry. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005. ISBN: 9781588262714 (Paperback). 305 Pages. $23.50.Reviewed by Ali Shehzad Zaidi1[Article copies available for a fee from Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www. transiormativestudies, ors O2014 by Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.jEditors Ronald J. Berger and Richard Quinney situate Storytelling Sociology within a tradition in which personal reflection and autobiography become means of social inquiry. Narrative is a discursive and social practice that both reflects and modifies social beliefs (De Fina 369). Through this transformative practice, storytelling sociology countervails positivist sociology, an ostensibly disinterested approach that reduces social experience to statistics (1-2) and people to specimens of scientific curiosity.The volume is prefaced by an essay titled The Narrative Tum in Social Inquiry and is divided into four parts that correspond to the themes of Family and Place, The Body, Education and Work, and The Passing of Time. Rooted in the kind of human experience that Robert Tally identifies as one of constant navigation, of locating oneself in relation to (1), the twenty-one essays in the volume succeed, often with undertones of grief and joy, in making sense of a world in flux and exploring the dynamic interaction between memory and place. Limitations of space allow discussion of only half a dozen of them in this review.In Searching for Norman K. Denzin relives his father's and grandfather's biographies, recreating their psychic and physical space: Dreaming my way into a midcentury landscape, I seek to understand my family's middle-class version of the American dream. Yellowstone Park is as good a place as any to start (17). Both Denzin's father and grandfather were salesmen who travelled the country and passed through Yellowstone Park.His father spent most of his life chasing the American Dream without success. He was always on the move, never quite stopping to take in his surroundings. His was a shallow existence that upheld conventional American values, as Denzin explains:My father believed in the U.S. of A. and in the American dream, no social security or affirmative action; he held to hard work, handcrafted bookcases, dark blue serge suits, gray sweaters, closecut hair, women in the kitchen, Camel cigarettes, home-cooked meals, community theater, learning from your mistakes, and after sobriety, kindness, generosity, and fierce loyalty to family (19).Denzin's father went through life the way that he drove through Yellowstone Park, without achieving the inner grace and satisfaction that his son attained.Denzin recalls that when he was a child his grandfather promised to take him to Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park but never did, leaving Denzin with wistful longing. His grandfather's single photograph of himself in Yellowstone, standing beside a Lincoln roadster, wearing a white shirt, a tie, a gray fedora, proudly pointing to a string of over twenty trout (18), acquired a kind of mythic importance for Denzin. In his present incarnation as a sixty-one year old professor and writer, Denzin reflects,The meaning of the picture is now evident: my grandfather's smile was an invitation to come to this site. Like others in his generation, he searched for meaning in his life. He was drawn to and found Yellowstone, and in this site he felt fulfilled and complete, fulfilled in a way that he never felt anywhere else. This is why he wanted to take me to Yellowstone, so I could experience this feeling for myself, so I could find myself in the fast-running waters of this river. (22)In her magisterial book For Space, Doreen Massey undermines a common notion that in effect petrifies space, placing it beyond time. …

Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy of Live Keratinocytes

Scanning ion conductance microscopy (SICM) is perhaps the least well known technique from the scanning probe microscopy (SPM) family of instruments. As with its more familiar counterpart, atomic force microscopy (AFM), the technique provides high-resolution topographic imaging, with the caveat that target structures must be immersed in a conducting solution so that a controllable ion current may be utilised as the basis for feedback. In operation, this non-contact characteristic of SICM makes it ideal for the study of delicate structures, such as live cells. Moreover, the intrinsic architecture of the instrument, incorporating as it does, a scanned micropipette, lends itself to combination approaches with complementary techniques such as patch-clamp electrophysiology: SICM therefore boasts the capability for both structural and functional imaging. For the present observations, an ICnano S system (Ionscope Ltd., Melbourn, UK) operating in 'hopping mode' was used, with the objective of assessing the instrument's utility for imaging live keratinocytes under physiological buffers. In scans employing cultured HaCaT cells (spontaneously immortalised, human keratinocytes), we compared the qualitative differences of live cells imaged with SICM and AFM, and also with their respective counterparts after chemical fixation in 4% paraformaldehyde. Characteristic surface microvilli were particularly prominent in live cell imaging by SICM. Moreover, time lapse SICM imaging on live cells revealed that changes in the pattern of microvilli could be tracked over time. By comparison, AFM imaging on live cells, even at very low contact forces (<nN), could not routinely image microvilli: rather, an apparently convolved image of the underlying cytoskeleton was instead prevalent. We note that the present incarnation of the commercial instrument falls some way behind the market leading SPMs in terms of technical prowess and scanning speed, however, the intrinsic non-obtrusive nature of SICM imaging leads us to advocate its use for monitoring the most delicate living structures with attendant high spatial resolutions.

The Constitutionality of the State Secrets Privilege: The Reynolds Privilege in Originalist Context

The following essay analyzes the state secrets privilege in its present incarnation, an evidentiary privilege capable of causing pre-discovery dismissal, in order to determine whether it can be reconciled with the original meaning of the Constitution. Part I traces the judicial origins and explanations of the privilege, in order to define its scope and effects at present. Part II discusses the textual, structural and historical arguments in favor of the constitutionality of the present incarnation of the state secrets privilege. As will be explained later, the constitutional text permits, implicitly, the use of the state secrets privilege, in its capacity as an adjunct to the executive power. Second, the constitution’s structure necessitates the existence of such a privilege. The nature of the judicial and legislative branches, confronted with the exigencies of statecraft, especially in light of the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation, required a unitary executive capable of controlling and prioritizing information implicated by matters of foreign affairs, even by restricting the flow of information to Congress and the Courts. Finally, presidential practice, judicial acquiescence and the understandings of the framing generation augur for the privilege’s constitutional legitimacy. When judges have confronted its exercise, they have, by and large, abdicated any ability to countermand it. Rather, they have tied its use to two sources, the Anglo-American common law of evidence and the structural position of the executive within the constitutional framework. This article analyzes the latter source, to show that courts are correct to say that the privilege “performs a function of constitutional significance.”

Vibrotactile Working Memory as a Model Paradigm for Psychology, Neuroscience, and Computational Modeling

Vibrotactile Working Memory as a Model Paradigm for Psychology, Neuroscience, and Computational Modeling

The European Parliament Intergroup for Traditional Minorities, National Communities and Languages, 2009–2014

The present European Parliament Intergroup for Traditional Minorities, National Communities and Languages was established in December 2009. Its over-arching function is to promote awareness of national and linguistic minority issues in Europe. Originally established in 1983, the present incarnation of the Intergroup continues the long tradition of the Parliament of using the cross-party Intergroup as the forum to focus and develop policy on the national and linguistic minority question. The current Intergroup has set out a dynamic and ambitious agenda, as such it reflects the new developments across Europe in the post-Lisbon era, an era that has seen the establishment of a new architecture in human rights coupled with the potential to embed national and linguistic minority rights at the heart of the European project. The article outlines the aims and objectives of the Intergroup, its history, its impact, and focuses on the current work and context of the Intergroup during the current parliamentary term.

An update of ADELEX: developing the lexical competence of Spanish university students through ICT in the ESHE

The educational experience related over the following pages is the result of several research projects undertaken after an evaluation of the vocabulary size of final year English philology students at the University of Granada (Spain), who were found to have a significant deficiency in their lexical competence. In view of the results obtained, which, amongst other things, demonstrated a clear cut lexical shortfall for future teachers of English, a group of lecturers from the same department formed the research group ADELEX and designed a semi-virtual course to redress this perceived deficit. The initiative was to become one of the first subjects to be sanctioned under the auspices of the Centre for Virtual Learning at the University of Granada (CEVUG). Later on, this online learning experience joined the Andalusian Virtual Campus (Campus Andaluz Virtual) and the new ADELEX was transformed into a fully virtual course, which obviously gave the project a wider scope. In its present incarnation, this updated version of ADELEX has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, its aim is to research into the nature of lexis (i.e. lexicology, semantics, pedagogical lexicography, phraseology etc.) as well as to focus on state-of-the-art digital methodology to solve real and meaningful problems that promote linguistic interaction in addition to autonomous and cooperative learning. On the other hand, it seeks to question Spanish university education on three fronts: (i) the integration and pedagogical use of new technologies in university pedagogy; (ii) European convergence and the implementation of the ECTS (European Credit Transfer System); and (iii) educational innovation aimed at bridging the gap between the university and the reality confronting students both in social and vocational contexts. Finally, this learning experience has been awarded the European Label for Pedagogic Innovation by the European Commission and the Spanish Ministry of Education, and is funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation within the National Research Programme.

Forging a Key, Turning a Lock: Counterinsurgency Theory in Iraq 2006–2008

Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine is designed to combat a defined insurgency. In the present situation in Iraq, COIN's definition has been radically extended to include nation-building as well. This additional function has expanded the scope of the role of the Coalition Forces in Iraq. Yet COIN in its present incarnation may not be enough to finalize the implementation of the strategy of nation-building. This article finds three main criticisms/limitations of contemporary COIN strategy: (1) It is predicated on a classic notion of insurgency that looks very different from present conflicts. (2) Although COIN advocates a political solution to a political problem, it uses (by default) mainly military mechanisms to carry it out. (3) Completion of the intricate and ambitious tasks necessary to defeat insurgencies in foreign lands may lie outside the direct control of the United States.

Judging and the Judicial Process

This is an updated and expanded (as of May 2010) draft of a set of course materials for a seminar entitled Judging and the Judicial Process. The materials are intended to be useful to both teachers and scholars. The focus of the course is on courts as institutions and on judges as the primary actors within those institutions. In their present incarnation, the materials open by outlining what one might call the standard model of judging, which calls for judge-umpires to apply determinate law via formalist analysis. The course then works through a series of critiques of that model, including the work of the legal realists, public law theorists, political scientists, cognitive scientists, and so on. Much of the remainder of the class is devoted to considering the various procedural constraints that work to ensure judicial accountability. These include judicial opinions, the doctrine of precedent, and the rest of Karl Llewellyn's major steadying factors. The materials also consider judicial activism and judicial independence, the relative merits of specialized versus generalist judges, the continued existence of nonlawyer judges, judicial ethics, and judicial selection at both the federal and state levels. Future versions will include sections on discretion, deference, managerial/bureaucratic judging, and the inherent powers of courts. These materials are a work in progress, and are surely incomplete in important respects. I welcome all feedback concerning how they might be improved.