Virtual Vacuum Research Articles

The geography of economic opportunity in the information society

Abstract This paper draws attention to the geography of economic opportunity in the information society. Canadian evidence is used to shed light on regional issues raised by the information revolution. While Canada's constituent provinces are all emerging as information‐based service economies, regional development is occurring in a virtual policy vacuum. In particular, existing regional policy is predicated on the assumption that Canada is still an industrial economy, as reflected in a continued emphasis on influencing the location of manufacturing production and access to transportation. Initial evidence on “first wave” impacts of economic and technical change suggests that the information revolution is likely to exacerbate current regional disparities. Finally, it is argued that historical patterns of cumulative economic development have provided Canada's most favored regions with a head start in the emerging information society.

Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness: A Study of "El casamiento enganoso y El coloquio de los perros" (review)

Reviews261 at the circumstances that favor the formation of classes, that make possible domination and exploitation — those circumstances that in some way block the mediating effect of the Symbolic order" (p. 136). While it seems a rather poor choice of words to talk of a "morality of the Symbolic" (p. 137), Racevskis finds Foucault's achievements at their most positive in his "desire to make manifest the unlimited human potential for creating meaning" (p. 138). Consequently, he avoids "the pretentiousness of any attempt at encapsulating his thought" (p. 15). Racevskis's discourse affects modesty. When he discusses critical reactions to Foucault's work, he values them in similar terms: "To put it simply, the discourse of Foucault is devoid of the pretentiousness of Baudrillard's critique" (p. 163). Yet, this is not an accurate representation of Foucault's extremely rich prose. This prose is furthermore presented in a virtual historical vacuum. To find Foucault's discourse "positive" and "liberating," a more systematic exploration is needed of Foucault's debt, debates with the Annales school, Althusser, and Derrida, and of shifts in Lacan's own discourse. Without succumbing to any biographical fallacy, which Racevskis rightly strives to avoid, Foucault's own intellectual strategy requires more attention to the circumstances which made his project possible. University of Maine at OronoDona M. Kercher Cervantes and the Mystery ofLawlessness: A Study of "El casamiento engañosoy El coloquio de los perros, "by Alan K. Forcione; 243 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, $35.00. With Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness, Professor Forcione adds another important study to his three previous books on Cervantes and the Novelas ejemplares. As the full title of his book suggests, Forcione's intent is to analyze lawlessness as it permeates the two elusive tales that close the Novelas. What he does is, in fact, far more wide ranging. In the first chapter Forcione analyzes the techniques that Cervantes employs both to create an overwhelming vision of universal disorder and to give this vision coherence. Cervantes, Forcione writes, provides "a grammar of narrative disorder" (p. 72) achieved through a hybridization of various genres. This mixture is rendered even more complex by the superimposition of at least two narrative planes, and through seemingly irrelevant and lengthy digressions, dislocation of narrative movement, the dismemberment of coherent form, and "promises" of upcoming resolutions that result in recurrent vanishing climaxes. The second chapter probes the pivotal episode in the Coloquio, the depiction of Cañizares and the mysterious world of witches which offers "an epiphanic vision 262Philosophy and Literature of evil" (p. 61). Forcione discusses at length Cervantes's exploration of evil against the background of the orthodox Christian vision of the forces of darkness. The final chapter in the first part is devoted to demonstrating that the seemingly aimless sequence of unraveling narrative indeed has a pattern and that "to a great extent the coherence of the work lies in its pervasive amplification of its central discontinuities, in its very incoherence" (p. 101). Forcione builds upon the works of other Cervantistas (Belie, Molho, El Saffar) who have already established that El coloquio de los perros is far more coherent than previously recognized. Forcione argues that what binds the narrative together, besides a pervasive atmosphere of lawlessness and evil, is a cumulative and unsettling effect of destructiveness and disintegration which is created by a constant movement from order to disorder. There are, furthermore, reiterated visions of disease, physical infirmity, decrepitude, and death. Building upon the central image of the octopus, Cervantes depicts man everywhere as enslaved by his bestial nature. Profanations of the sacred pervade the entire work and reach their apogee during the "Cañizares orgiastic banquet at the witches' sabbath [which] takes the shape of a communion of demons and a desecration of the Lord's Supper " (p. 117). Part Two ("The Awakening at the End of the Night") examines "the positive counterweights which Coloquio does develop and which indicate that even in his darkest work Cervantes does not abandon the faith that his epic heroine Auristela affirms" (p. 134). "The awakening and the promise of a new life" (p. 127) that Forcione discovers is reduced to three events. He interprets...

Self-Similar Motions for Compressible Media

A new self-similar plane flow model is discovered through an unsteady flow theory previously developed. The physical situation considered concerns the possible generation of a shock-led recompression layer in front of an interface when the latter is moving against a fully-developed centered rarefaction wave in such a way that its distance from a certain virtual vacuum boundary has some w power-law dependence on time after initiation. The present study treats the detailed character of this recompression and shows conclusively that similarity solutions exist for any constant-γ medium driven by a constant-w (>1) interface motion. Their main features are (1) that flow similarity is exact only when viewed from the virtual vacuum boundary, (2) that entropy distribution is uniform, and (3) that any family of flows sharing common w and γ lead to identical flow profiles and shock strength with the latter explicitly given by a Mach number M = (γ + 1) (γ − 1)−1 w − 2(γ − 1)−1. Test calculations for a w = γ = 2 special case have been included as a demonstration. The analogy in the two-dimensional steady hypersonic flow is noted.

Growth Models and Underdeveloped Economies

T HE postwar literature on growth economics has tended to distinguish the growth process in a relatively highly developed from that in a so-called area. In the former case the analyses have been characterized by severe rigor, with consequent imposition of restrictive assumptions setting definite and specific boundaries to the problems. To a large extent, work in this area is an extension of the savings-investment analysis of Keynes into more dynamic formulations. In discussions of the developmental process of underdeveloped countries, however, there is the exactly opposite approach; the problem is usually very generally defined, rigor is frequently completely absent, and the variables considered inevitably spill over into areas which economists have long treated as beyond the scope of the discipline (for example, population, and technological change). In the absence of a frameworka model within which to examine the problems of the underdeveloped country, much of the discussion has taken place in a virtual theoretical vacuum and consequently is often unsatisfactory both logically and practically. The purpose of this paper is to examine a modified version of the growth theory developed by Domar, Harrod, Fellner,' and others in the light of the more commonly known characteristics of the underdeveloped and to attempt to make a more systematic and rigorous statement than has hitherto been made of the developmental process and problems in these countries. The procedure is as follows: I shall examine the assumptions made in existing growth models and the conditions necessary to make these assumptions (or alternative ones) valid. Then, on the basis of readily available data for the United States and the United Kingdom, I suggest hypotheses about the conditions that have actually obtained in the economic growth of these countries. These hypotheses are then transplanted to the underdeveloped country, and their implications are examined for an economic system with the features of the modern underdeveloped country. It seems necessary to digress a moment in order to state explicitly what the general features of the modern underdeveloped country are and to indicate the form of the growth theory that I shall use. Of course, no two underdeveloped countries are exactly alike; but the descriptive literature' on such countries suggests enough similarity that we may confidently describe a representative

PROPERTIES OF THE BLOOD OF THE SKATE (RAIA OSCILLATA)

In the acid range, carbon dioxide pressure has almost no effect on affinity of skate's whole blood for oxygen. In the physiological range the effect is appreciable but still only one-half as great as in man. No difference was discerned between the carbon dioxide dissociation curves of oxygenated and of reduced blood. This was partly due to the facts that the hemoglobin concentration is one-fourth as great as in man and that the carbonic acid-combining capacity (when pCO2 = 40 mm.) is less than in man.The effect of temperature on the oxygen dissociation curves is identical with that found by Brown and Hill (1923) for human blood but somewhat different from that found by Redfield and Florkin (1931) for Urechis blood.The buffer value of plasma proteins is about twice as great, per unit weight, as that of human plasma proteins. Since the concentration f protein in skate's plasma is one-third to one-half as great as in human plasma, it follows that the buffer value of plasma of the two species is about the same. Buffer value of whole blood is nearly equal to that of human blood of the same oxygen-combining capacity.Transfer of gases between the blood and the external medium takes place under conditions which are quite different from those in the lungs of man. Nevertheless arterial blood is about equally saturated with oxygen in the two species. The absolute values for carbon dioxide pressure in man and the skate are very different because the blood of the skate is exposed to a virtual vacuum in respect to carbon dioxide. The pressure head of carbon dioxide from blood to the external medium, however, is of the same order of magnitude, about 1 mm. in each species. The supposition that there is a steep pressure gradient in respect to carbon dioxide in such a marine species as the skate is incorrect.