Self-imposed Rules Research Articles

Sonnet in Stitches: – Patchwork Variations of Modern Religious Sonnets in English

Across time and geography, the sonnet has served as a vehicle for poets to explore a diverse range of subjects, from personal love and loss, to political and social issues, and to meditate on the human condition itself. This paper will explore the patchwork variations of some modern religious sonnets in English, examining how contemporary poets are using the sonnet form to explore faith, doubt, and spirituality in new and innovative ways. Through an analysis of several representative works, we will demonstrate how these poets are breathing new life into this versatile form, creating works that are both timeless and timely. While many contemporary sonnets depart from the traditional structure of rhyme and meter, they still adhere to a set of self-imposed rules and limitations. This allows poets to experiment with new forms of expression and to explore religious themes in a more relatable and accessible way. Humour, colloquialism, and self-irony are all common features of contemporary religious sonnets, which often depict the sacred in the context of everyday life. Contemporary sonnets attempt to convey the ineffable mystery of religious experience through language, but they are more self-aware of their own structure and the ways in which they depart from tradition. This systematic deconstruction is a significant element of the contemporary sonnet, reflecting the fragmented and chaotic nature of modern existence.

Heads, Seekers, Psychonauts, and One-Timers: Patterns in Stories of Psychedelic Consumption

Psychedelics are psychoactive substances that alter ordinary states of consciousness. The U.S. criminalized ingestion of these drugs approximately 60 years ago and use remains punishable by law. Prior to this time, the substances were differentially declared spiritual sacraments, medicines, and/or party drugs. (Auto)Ethnographies and other research often indicate psychedelic-induced experiences as remarkably personal, necessitating subjective interpretation. Empirical studies exploring patterns across psychedelic encounters are rare, but among the few that exist, users tend to be identified as either pursuing psycho-spiritual enlightenment or self-indulgent amusement. The present paper utilizes narratives collected through 37 in-depth interviews with adults from diverse social backgrounds who report a history of psychedelic consumption in non-clinical settings. The data suggest a potential 4-part categorization based on five factors: named forms of psychedelic substances used, reported frequency of psychedelic ingestions, stated reasons for consumption and desistance, self-imposed rules surrounding use, and descriptions of drug effects and experiences.

The European Commission’s Handling of Non-priority Antitrust Complaints: An Empirical Assessment

The Union legislature and courts leave the European Commission a wide discretion in dealing with antitrust complaints submitted to it. The principal external constraint is that if the Commission chooses not to pursue a formal complaint, it must reject it by means of a reasoned decision, which may be subject to judicial review. But the Commission’s administrative discretion is primarily structured and confined by self-imposed rules and principles. Most of these were introduced or formalized when Regulation 1/2003 was adopted and were intended to incentivize complainants to inform the Commission about potential infringements of the EU antitrust rules. This article maps the precise boundaries of the Commission’s discretion to shelve non-priority antitrust complaints and subsequently examines how the Commission operates within that discretionary space. The empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset of all the rejection decisions the Commission adopted between 2009 and 2021, many of which were uncovered and obtained through access to documents requests. It reveals certain discrepancies between the stated rules and principles governing its treatment of complaints and their implementation in practice, which have the clear potential to undermine the incentives the current complaint handling system sought to create for the filing of formal complaints. antitrust, European Commission, complaints, complainant, prioritization, rejection, enforcement, discretion, priority setting

Forming a Doctor-Patient Alliance During COVID-19 to Enhance Treatment Outcomes for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Forming a Doctor-Patient Alliance During COVID-19 to Enhance Treatment Outcomes for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

The Productive Anarchy of Scientific Imagination

Imagination is important for many things in science: solving problems, interpreting data, designing studies, and much else. Philosophers of imagination typically account for the productive role played by imagination in science by focusing on how imagination is constrained, for example, by self-imposed rules to infer logically or model events accurately. But the constraints offered by these philosophers constrain either too much or not enough, and they can never account for uses of imagination that are needed to break today’s constraints in order to make progress tomorrow. Thus, epistemology of imagination needs to make room for an element of epistemological anarchy.

Can a contractarian be a paternalist? The logic of James M. Buchanan’s system

Abstract At various points in his work, James Buchanan mentions favorably the idea of private constitutional choice, that is, it can be rational for a present-biased individual to constrain her future behavior by self-imposed rules of personal conduct. Given that in a classical liberal world such self-constitutions would face no political or legal obstacle, we ask whether reasonable people would call on the state to assist them in the enforcement of their personal constitutions. In this paper, we provide several arguments for the incompatibility of Buchanan’s contractarianism with various forms of state paternalism.

Can the Federal Budget Process Promote Fiscal Sustainability? Evidence from Synthetic Control Using Lasso

Can the federal budget be constrained using congressionally self-imposed rules? The Budgetary Enforcement Act of 1990 (BEA90), in effect from 1992 to 2002, is frequently held up as an example of congressional control that largely succeeded in doing so and its expiration is considered a watershed event. This paper finds supportive evidence that BEA90 constrained non-defense discretionary outlays using a synthetic control/Lasso hybrid regression methodology. The estimated effect of BEA90 is around 10 percent. However, the sampling variation suggests the probability that these results arose from chance is around 30 percent. Confronted with a common applied empirical problem of having many potential predictors (over 2,000) and a short time-series (12 years), we propose novel additional checks that successfully cross-validate the synthetic control’s counterfactual model.

Sightseeing, social climbing, steamboats and sex: Anne Lister’s 1828 tour of Scotland

ABSTRACTThis article uses Anne Lister’s diaries as the basis of an exploration of writing about travel as part of a diary-keeping routine. It focuses on entries relating to Lister’s tour of Scotland in 1828 to reveal an underexplored period of her life and suggest how diaries can shed new light on the experience of home tour travel in the early nineteenth century. This study, while bringing new information about, and insights into, one of Lister’s least explored lesbian relationships, firmly places the author within her historical context and social circle. It argues that the diary form allows Lister to record a broader range of travel experiences, and that the full picture she presents of her inner and outer lives provides insights into her motivations as a traveller that are rare in a conventional tour journal. However, Lister’s self-imposed record-keeping rules and quirks make these diaries subjective and idiosyncratic as sources, and an awareness of Anne Lister’s diaries as a site of self-fashioning is important when reading them as travelogue.

Scrivere da altri per altri: l'autorialità illegittima della fanfiction online

As a work of fiction written by fans for other fans taking a source text as a point of departure, fan fiction seems to question some of the most important cornerstones of modern literary writing such as original creativity and intellectual property. This peculiar kind of writing therefore raises problems of both legal and artistic nature. Is it legal to write using someone else’s story and characters without his permission? Where is the boundary between the rights of the author and the rights of the reader? Can a transformative writing aspire to authorship?All those controversial subjects were almost invisible as long as fan fiction was a private practice published in fanzines and read during conventions. But nowadays, on the Internet the invisible – so to speak – has become visible and fan fiction has to cope with new challenges (censorship, criticism, external rules) as well as old habits (ethical constraints, open discussions, self-imposed rules). This article examines the complex nature of online fan fiction both on the legal and on the authorial side and shows how a fan fiction community works and organizes itself through the analysis of the largest Italian community, Efpfanfic.net.

Communication Commentary: Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders: From Compulsions to Communication: Forming a Therapeutic Alliance With Individuals Diagnosed With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Communication Commentary: Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders: From Compulsions to Communication: Forming a Therapeutic Alliance With Individuals Diagnosed With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

An Investigation of Psychological Factors Inluencing Investment Decision Making

This  study  applies  a  second-order  conirmatory  factor  analysis  (CFA)  approach  to investigate  psychological  factors  inluencing  individuals'  investment  decision-making.  A second-order  CFA  approach  consists  of  ive  irst-order  psychological  factors  in  terms  of mental  accounting,  regret  avoidance,  self-control,  heuristic  and  overconidence,  and  one second-order factor in terms of investment decision-making. Quantitative data was yielded by the questionnaire, and an effective sample of 752 responses was used to execute the estimation procedure.  The  results  reveal  that  there  exist  statistically  signiicant  relationships  between ive psychological factors and investment decision-making. Investors are likely to consider a product with different functions as one with different mental accounts (gains). Thus, inancial institutions  are  advised  to  provide  their  potential  customers  with  multi-function  products. Since self-control is  a  signiicant self-imposed mechanism  for  investment decision-making, inancial institutions can merchandise products that can help their customers to execute the self-imposed rules of thumb. ");} // --> activate javascript

Kämpfen gegen Windmühlen und reale Mächte: William Lottigs Tagebuch (1919–1921) als Ausdruck der politischen, pädagogischen und schulinternen Machverhältnisse in einer Hamburger Gemeinschaftsschule zu Beginn der 1920er Jahre

In his daily journal on the founding of the public experimental school, a “community school” at the Berliner Tor in Hamburg between spring 1919 and September 1921, Lottig describes the everyday issues confronting the principal of the “new school” at that time. These concern classroom instruction, teachers, parents, external pressures on the Berliner Tor-School, the relationship with the school administration, political issues prevalent in Hamburg at that time, ideological and philosophical debates as well as personal and family relationship problems, all of which Lottig describes in his journal. Lottig also noted the reasoning underpinning the development of the school experiments: the “old” schools in Hamburg had been closed, and the state had in their place established experimental schools. The journal clearly records the difficulties, issues and successes of a principal of one of the newly established community schools (Lebensgemeinschaftsschulen), which had been established as experimental schools. A perusal of the diary indicates that Jakob Robert Schmid’s sole and up to now only one known analysis of the journal comes off as biased and misleading. Schmid, professor of education at the University of Berne, had, at the beginning of the 1930s, only perused and analysed those portions of Lottig’s journal in which Lottig describes the rather turbulent if inspiring – and yet chaotic – operation of the community school in its first two years. While Schmid analysed these portions, he did not consider Lottig’s other, more favourable and constructive comments. Schmid also did not explain his one-sided selection of journal passages. Schmid brands Lottig and his team of teachers as educational novices and classifies the Berliner Tor-School as an “anti-authoritarian” institution, an experimental school like any other school experiment which overshoots the mark, not being educationally and institutionally meaningful. A more objective and principled approach in examining Lottig’s journal would have revealed that Lottig and his teachers were well aware of the main issue confronting the school, an issue that Schmid would also have found relevant: the relation of freedom and compulsion, within a setting that Lottig wanted to revitalise, to productively equilibrate without employing the customary disciplinary instruments. Lottig furthermore again and again points emphatically to the “growing pains” of all alternative schools (even when regulated by the state as an experimental school), whose goal it had been, to establish, even under difficult circumstances, a “new school-type” not utilising the traditional instruments of discipline, instruction and school management. This proves that Lottig was neither an educational ignoramus nor unaware of the basic issue of classroom instruction: how one can instruct with or without compulsion. Lottig’s goal had always been – and this Schmid also disregarded – to replace traditional, imposed, mandated or even self-imposed rules and regulations by new, commonly worked out rules. Lottig’s journal is a good example of the steadfast, unrelenting and energy-sapping aspiration of a school principal to balance the relation of school management versus a school’s self-development under the given circumstances. In addition, Schmid’s misinterpretation is a good example of how an observer, who hardly knew the Berliner Tor-School, would misuse this historical source by means of a biased interpretation to further his own views on scholastic education, views that Lottig himself would have preferred to provocatively examine – Schmid’s “authoritative pedagogy”, which goes beyond all authoritarian and non-authoritarian educational policies. What, then, would Lottig have recorded in his journal about a meeting with Schmid?

Dogme 95 and disabled identity on film

ABSTRACTDogme 95 was a film and video movement that energized Danish film production and provoked reams of publicity and criticism. The conceit of the movement was to rail against aesthetic considerations and to make films in a uniform fashion; to move beyond tired formalism and find freedom within a rigid set of self-imposed rules. Two works produced during the initial years of the movement—Lars von Trier's Idioterne (1998) and Harmony Korine's Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)—remain significant for cannily linking the movement's anti-aesthetic aims with a concern for and/or fascination with representations of mental and physical disability. Both films use that kinship between form and content as a starting point and then up the ante by having actors encounter actual disability within fictional contexts. A comparison of these two works calls attention to divergent methods of representing disabled identity in fiction film and the ethical quandaries therein. In my analysis of the films' narrative and aesthetic approaches to disability, I argue that Idioterne and Julien Donkey-Boy challenge both the general illusory tendencies of Hollywood-style cinema as well as Hollywood cinema's specific shortcomings concerning accurate, nuanced representations and the prevalence of depictions of disability. Though Dogme's relationship with disability is ambivalent and leaves a corpus of contradictions, these films utilize a ‘disabled aesthetic’. They are formally dis-abled when judged in the context of professional standards of production and are valuable for the ways in which they disrupt conventional cultural and filmic depictions of disability.

Shadow Banking and the Limits of Central Bank Liquidity Support: How to Achieve a Better Balance between Global and Official Liquidity

Global liquidity provision is highly procyclical. The recent financial crisis has resulted in a flight to safety, with severe strains in key funding markets leading central banks to employ highly unconventional policies to avoid a systemic meltdown. Bagehot’s advice to “lend freely at high rates against good collateral” has been stretched to the limit in order to meet the liquidity needs of dysfunctional financial markets. As the eligibility criteria for central bank borrowing have been tweaked, it is legitimate to ask, How elastic should the supply of central bank currency be?Even when the central bank has the ability to create abundant official liquidity, there should be some limits to its support for the financial sector. Traditionally, the misuse of the fiat money privilege has been limited by self-imposed rules that central bank loans must be fully backed by gold or collateralized in some other way. But since the onset of the crisis, we have seen how this constraint has been relaxed to accommodate the demand for market support. My suggestion is that there has to be some upper limit, and that we should work hard to find guidelines and policies that can limit the need for central bank liquidity support in future crises. In this paper, I review the recent expansion of central bank liquidity support during the crisis, before discussing the collateral polices related to central banks’ lender-of-last-resort and market-maker-of-last-resort policies and their rationale. I then examine the relationship between the central bank and the treasury, and the potential threat to central bank independence if they venture into too much risky balance sheet expansion. A discussion about the exceptional growth of the shadow banking system follows. I introduce the concept of “liquidity illusion” to describe the fragility upon which much of the sector is based, and note that market growth has been based largely on a “fair-weather” view that central banks will support the market on rainy days.I argue that we need a better theoretical framework to understand the growth in the shadow banking system and the role of central banks in providing liquidity in a crisis.Recently, the concept of “endogenous finance” has been used to explain the strong procyclical tendencies of the global financial system. I show that this concept was central to Hyman P. Minsky’s theory of financial instability, and suggest that his insights should be integrated into the ongoing search for a better theoretical framework for understanding the growth of the shadow banking system and how we can limit official liquidity support for this system. I end the paper with a summary and a discussion of some of the policy issues. I note that the Basel III “package” will hopefully reduce the need for central bank liquidity support in the future, but suggest that further structural reforms of the financial sector are needed to ease the tension between freewheeling private credit expansion and the limited ability or willingness of central banks to provide unlimited official liquidity support in a future crisis.

Applicability of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) in Japanese fisheries: A comparison of rights-based fisheries management in Iceland, Japan, and United States

Abstract ITQs have not yet been introduced by the Government of Japan. In coastal areas, fishery cooperative associations have traditionally played an important role in managing fisheries through self-imposed rules and peer-monitoring systems. Recently, however, the economic competitiveness of Japanese fisheries in the international market is being questioned. In this paper, a detailed examination of the pros and cons of the current system in Japan is compared to the current fishery management measures of Iceland and the United States, where attaining economically or biologically efficient outcomes may be prioritized in making fisheries management decisions. For many coastal fisheries in Japan, maintaining a management scheme in which stakeholders play an active role in determining fisheries measures seems more relevant if their priority is to maintain the stability of coastal communities and equity of stakeholders. Intensive dialog among stakeholders would be necessary to identify shared objectives of their fishery operations and to make decisions to establish specific steps toward the goal of increasing economic efficiency, environmental sustainability, or stability of communities and equity of stakeholders.

On Women and Life

Het onvermoeibaar epos (The tireless epic): Fieret-Tichy-Heyboer Fotomuseum Den Haag The Hague, the Netherlands October 2, 2010-January 9, 2011 The connection between artist Gerard Peter Fieret (1924-2009) and the Fotomuseum of his hometown, The Hague, the Netherlands, has always been strong. In 2004 the museum featured a major retrospective of Fieret's work to honor him and to celebrate his eightieth birthday. Six years later, the retrospective's curator, Wim van Sinderen, decided to deepen this achievement by displaying the work of Fieret and two other self-taught photographers and outsiders to mainstream photography, Anton Heyboer (1924 - 2005), who was also Dutch, and Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy (1926--). Multiple factors occasioned the exhibit: the Gemeentemuseum's acquisition of the Fieret's estate after his death, the growing global attention to Tichy--marked by the solo shows at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2008 and at the International Center of Photography in New York City in 2010--and the accidental discovery of mislabeled photos by Heyboer in the Gemeentemueum collection in 2009. The show aimed to provide a panoramic view of the vast production of the three artists (displaying roughly fifty images from each), and highlighted the similarities in their works as well as the differences in their approach and intentions. This parallelism greeted the viewer from the exhibit entrance, where an introductory panel explaining the theme was wedged between a selection of three works from each artist. In each of the three rooms of the exhibition, explicative texts summarized each photographer's biography and his specific conception and use of the tools of the trade. The installation of display cases constituted a theatrical reconstruction of the artists' workspace, cleverly enabling an enhanced understanding of the work. Proceeding through the exhibition, the viewer first encountered Fieret's piles of writings and photocopies, along with his disposable and non-disposable cameras and a tank full of negative film rolls. Next was Tichy's vitrine containing his famous self-made cameras, an enlarger, hundreds of film rolls, drawings, sketches, and books. Last but not least were Heyboer's Hasselblad cameras, a Leica M5, and lenses, all covered in pink paint (which should have been white, were it not for a misplaced drop of red pigment that tainted the bucket). The paint was intended to minimize the aura of the medium and transform it into a ludic object (as opposed to a professional-looking one) and to assert Heyboer's detached and complete possession of it. The exhibition's selection was in many ways sporadic. Curator Wim van Sinderen seemed to rely above all on instinct when choosing his images, as opposed to any dogmatic, qualitative norm. The exhibition's title a quotation taken from a poem written by Fieret--affirmed the constant, intensive, obsessive nature of the work of all three photographers. Their process, in which a continuous flow of images is generated rhythmically and devoutly, grants no space for hierarchy, for assigning rank on a scale of importance and prominence. The exhibition's random selection and presentation were in keeping with that creative freedom. Yet it did not neglect a common subject for all three photographers--women--albeit in different declinations. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Compared and read through the recent critical acknowledgements, photography historian Clement Cheroux's concept of the serendipitous flaw or fault is central to understanding the unconventionality of the artists' vision and the originality of their composition and framing. In this work, the fault is a consequence of precise choices, in which imperfection is pursued as an element of aesthetics, poetry, and eventually truth--as they saw it and supports the photographers' commitment to following their own intuitions and self-imposed rules. …

Kontrollierter Konsum von Opiaten und Kokain

In this article self-controlled consumption of legal or illegal drugs is defined as a drug use pattern which follows self-imposed consumption rules or plans. Self-controlled use of drugs such as heroin or cocaine without negative health, social or criminal consequences is a more widespread phenomenon in European countries as one might expect. Moderate and self-controlled drug use is not only prevalent among socially integrated consumers. Also formerly dependent drug users who overcame their addiction with or without professional help are able to develop a controlled drug use pattern. By now, there are different behavioural self-control trainings for reducing drug use. First results of evaluation studies indicate positive effects of such interventions. There is a need to introduce self-control programmes in the drug care system for drug users who are not able or not willing to live abstinent.

Medical visas mark growth of Indian medical tourism

Medical visas mark growth of Indian medical tourism

Lobster Trap Limits: A Solution to a Communal Action Problem

Most major fisheries of the world are becoming depleted, largely by human over-exploitation. The basic problem is that fishers cannot or will not generate rules to conserve the resources upon which their livelihood depends. They are unable to solve this communal action dilemma although all would gain. Some fisher groups have been able to establish conservation-oriented guidelines either by lobbying the state (a centralized solution) or by generating self-imposed rules (a decentralized solution). We analyze the factors that allow lobster fishers on four Maine islands to benefit from self-imposed trap limits while most other lobster fishers must await decisions of the state legislature. It is argued that Knight's bargaining theory of norm development explains the trap limit. At root, trap limit rules are the result of a distributional fight over the resource. However, a number of other factors are necessary for fishers to constrain themselves informally. This case modifies and extends the use of rational choice theory in understanding the generation of rules for conserving resources.

Changes in Food Intake in Response to Stress in Men and Women: Psychological Factors

The relationship between psychological factors and changes in food intake during stress (both during a specific experience and during stress, in general) in 49 men, ages 18 to 34, and 52 women, ages 18 to 35, was assessed using questionnaires. Participants completed the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Eating Inventory (which includes scales for disinhibition, cognitive restraint and perceived hunger) the Restraint Scale, the Eating Attitudes Test and the Binge Scale; and reported their height and weight. Men and women were divided into two groups regarding changes in eating habits during stress: increased intake and no increased intake. There were no significant differences between genders in the proportions of participants in each group. However, correlational analyses revealed different patterns of associations for males and females. For females, high scores on disinhibition were significantly correlated with eating more than usual during a specific stressful experience (r = 0.51, p < 0.001) as well as during stress, in general (r = 0.66, p < 0.001), while high scores on cognitive restraint were not. For males, neither disinhibition nor cognitive restraint were associated with the relationship between eating and stress. Scores on disinhibition discriminated over 80% of females who reported increased intake during stress from those who reported no increased intake. In females, the inability to maintain control of self-imposed rules concerning food intake is an important factor in the relationship between stress and eating.