Version Of Agency Research Articles

Effect of adding variables on rotational ambiguity in positive matrix factorization solutions

A major problem that limit the use of the model-free analysis methods, like positive matrix factorization (PMF), for the resolution of multivariate data is that usually, there is rotational ambiguity in the results. Implementing adequate constraints may reduce such ambiguities. In some special cases, non-negativity constraints may serve as a sufficient condition to uniquely resolve profiles. In this study, effect of adding new variables on the extent of rotational ambiguity is investigated, and profiles with lower rotation have been obtained on the basis of data set structure. The displacement (DISP) method of error estimation (EE) for the factor elements incorporated into the US Environmental Protection Agency's version of positive matrix factorization (PMF) has been applied to capture the uncertainty of PMF analyses due to rotational ambiguity. To explore these considerations, results are presented for synthetic including submicron particle size distributions (12–470nm) measured between January 2008 and December 2010 at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYS DEC) site in Rochester, NY. Generally, added informative variables can reduce the ambiguity in the profiles. The results of the PMF analysis showed the effect of adding new variables to feasible solutions led to significantly decreased (up to 44%) DISP intervals. More robust results with lower rotational uncertainty became possible and the results were more easily interpreted. This approach can be applied to any other field that utilize quantitative factor analysis methods.

Mental States of Addiction

An increasing number of studies have examined lay meanings of addiction. The purpose of this study was to explore whether a generalized conception of an addiction mind-set was evident in the beliefs of a sample of 1,062 Norwegian adults responding to an online survey. The respondents were given a rating task in the following form: “Addiction to [substance/behavior] is/represents [descriptive term].” For each of the nine different addictive behaviors (cocaine, cannabis, alcohol, gambling, smoking, amphetamine, sedatives, snus, and heroin), the respondents rated their endorsement of 11 descriptive terms (mental states): reduced self-determination, obsession, strong urge, strong appetite, strong craving, reduced moral competence, reduced rational decision making, compulsion, habit, conflicting desire, and reduced willpower. Principal components analyses identified two distinct factors for six addictive behaviors: cocaine, cannabis, alcohol, gambling, amphetamine, and heroin. The endorsement levels of the descriptive items of the two factors were consistently high. Sedatives, smoking, and snus did not fit into the two factors. Norwegian adults thus seem to ascribe to a model of an addiction mind-set comprising two distinct versions, the irresistible, involuntary (Craving-compulsion version), and the voluntary resistible dimensions of addiction (Reduced agency version).

“Let Me Bite You Again”

This essay examines restrictions on and opportunities for agency in Fledgling, Octavia Butler's 2005 science fiction vampire novel. Reading agency through three relational modes—belonging, trauma, and consensual nonconsent—it argues that Fledgling helps us critically consider agency in a queer, posthumanist context. Butler's vampires become figures through which the text highlights conflicting desires (for independence and dependence, autonomy and belonging) that flow through the seemingly unified modern subject. This novel reinforces feminist and queer critiques of humanist notions of agency while allowing that some version of agency does survive for the postmodern subject within embodied and relational experiences of subjectivity.

Considerations for translation rights 2.0

As the contours of the globalized digital information society become apparent, so does the need for a reform of translation rights within the intellectual property regime. The history of translation rights provides insights that help us understand the underlying economic and political tensions in copyright negotiations today. The various versions of agency in translation studies, which run parallel to recent interactive technologies, destabilize important notions in copyright law, such as authorship, originality, and the idea-expression dichotomy. Finally, translational ethics can perhaps contribute to redirect current dialogues on copyright and language policy towards increased interdisciplinarity and internationalism, in part, as a result of decentralizing power.

Governmentality accounts of the economy: a liberal bias?

The governmentality literature offers a host of insights into liberal modes of government. A key theme in this literature is that the economy came to be seen as an autonomous domain requiring its own form of governmental reason. Yet the emergence of the economy has never been specified, in terms of both what would constitute an economy and how it was constituted. Instead, the appearance of an economy has been conflated with the general rise of liberal understandings of agency. In this paper I seek to provide an alternative and more precise account. This involves showing how the importance of Smith lies not so much in his formulation of a liberal version of agency, but in the disjunction he introduces between reason of state and political oeconomy. Crucially, despite his significance, Smith's arguments do not usher in an economy. For that event we have to wait for Ricardo's problematic of distribution. This alternative account is intended to weaken the association of the rise of liberal government with the emergence of the economy as an object of thought.

Flogging a Dead Language: Identity Politics, Sex, and the Freak Reader in Acker's Don Quixote

Flogging a Dead Language: Identity Politics, Sex, and the Freak Reader in Acker’s Don Quixote Nicola Pitchford Pastiche is central to the resistant politics of Kathy Acker’s writing—yet she would appear to agree with Fredric Jameson’s influential critique of pastiche as “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language” (17). Her 1986 novel Don Quixote is all about having to speak “in a dead language” in the absence of a more “healthy” norm. It begins with the death of the protagonist, a female version of Cervantes’s knight, who then goes on to narrate much of the subsequent story. Acker explains, “BEING DEAD, DON QUIXOTE COULD NO LONGER SPEAK. BEING BORN INTO AND PART OF A MALE WORLD, SHE HAD NO SPEECH OF HER OWN. ALL SHE COULD DO WAS READ MALE TEXTS WHICH WEREN’T HERS” (39). The novel then proceeds by plagiarism and pastiche, as Quixote goes on a quest—for a heterosexual love unsullied by patriarchal power relations—through fragments of numerous existing texts. Quixote rereads and pieces together a whole range of textual scraps, from Machiavelli’s The Prince to a Godzilla movie. What becomes clear in her eccentric survey of (primarily) Western culture is that the lost, healthy linguistic norm is more than unhealthy for female readers—indeed, it is deadly. The novel is motivated by the idea of both reading and speaking “in a dead language”—but “flogging a dead language” seems a more apt description of Acker’s strategy, in more ways than one. For both the reader in and the reader of the novel, the act of rereading that pastiche entails can seem like flogging a dead horse, in the sense of merely covering once again the familiar ground of the already said. Of course, the same has been said of any reading in postmodernity where all language may well be dead, having belonged properly to a previous historical moment that gave it life and from which it has now been dissociated by forces of commercial appropriation and cultural amnesia. But this generic deadness that Jameson identifies as inherent in postmodern writing is not quite what I wish to explore. Rather, I want to attempt to account for what I see as a particular familiarity, and perhaps a particular tendency toward exhaustion and redundancy, that accompanies reading Acker’s texts from this period in her career, a period characterized by Acker’s extensive use of pastiche or what she frequently refers to as “plagiarism.” In what follows, I look at what happens to and through the act of reading, to ask how reading is connected to agency. Despite the considerable difficulty of Acker’s experimental novels, reading them can become an activity weighed down by a certain deadening obviousness. I want to suggest that this lifelessness derives from Acker’s attempts to construct, through pastiche, a community of readers defined by their opposition to traditional literary culture. I want also to argue that her deployment of pastiche in specific contexts—especially sexual contexts—in fact complicates and undermines the static and oversimplified role that she sometimes seems to offer her reader. In such moments, a complex interplay of various possible readerly identifications creates a contingent and particular version of agency. In a chapter on Acker in his recent book on literary celebrity, Joe Moran has suggested that in both her public persona and her work, Acker “puts forward two contrasting views of identity—one textual and one essentialist” (142). While he locates these competing versions in Acker’s characters and in her own public performance of the (death of the) author, I wish to extend his observations and apply them also to the modes of reading suggested by her texts, and by this novel in particular. The “textual” version of identity, generally celebrated by those critics friendly to Acker’s work, is readily apparent in the cut-and-paste technique of Don Quixote, in which borrowed textual fragments are reanimated by their juxtaposition. Here, language (my metaphorical dead horse), along with the social identities it produces, is like Quixote’s skinny nag Rocinante, who by all rights should be dead but who keeps lurching doggedly...