100 research outputs found
Sort by
The Process of Becoming a Woman’s Body: Menstruation and the Containment of Femininity
No full textNo body event in a girl’s (or a woman’s) life is more ambivalently coded than menstruation. Tied to both the filth of bodily waste and the possibility of motherhood, menstruation has powerful social connotations that lead to its virtual erasure from “polite” discourse. When menstruation or menarche is acknowledged openly, it is usually done for one reason: containment. The two billion dollar a year feminine hygiene industry offers items for sale that “protect,” but the actual mechanics of menstruation are never addressed in the industry’s advertising, saving vulnerable men and children from the knowledge of what, exactly, menstrual products do. Why do we need so much protection from menstruation, and who, exactly, is being protected? Where does the danger lie? This paper addresses the ways girls are taught to contain the potential dangers of menstruation and argues that hiding the realities of menstruation forms part of girls’ larger project of learning to shape their bodies into the “contained” or “classical” body of normative femininity
Public Memory Meets Archival Memory: The Interpretation of Williamsburg’s Secretary’s Office
No full textOne of the restored buildings in the Colonial Williamsburg historic site is the Secretary’s Office, built in 1747-48, the oldest public records structure in the Englishspeaking colonies. Probably few archivists and other records professionals know that the antecedents of their profession are well represented in such a popular tourist attraction. This essay considers three lessons for archivists in their quest for greater public understanding and support, drawing on how this old public records structure has been interpreted. First, the essay suggests that the story of the Secretary’s Office is not well known by archivists and those interested in the history of efforts to preserve our documentary heritage. Second, the essay recounts the story of the failure by America’s premier and pioneering historic site to interpret fully the legacy of the public records office. Finally, the essay indicates that the lack of interpretation represents alost opportunity to promote public understanding of what records represent, why archives are important, and the work of archivists
Legal Update 2007: Where the Lawsuits Are
No full textLawsuits are a fact of life for most major corporations, organizations, and agencies. Over the course of a typical year, they may be involved in dozens of lawsuits over a wide variety of issues. Customers and users sue over products or services. Employers sue over workplace issues. Suppliers sue–or get sued–over contract issues. Or they initiate lawsuits to protect their products, services, employers or suppliers. Lawsuits are a fairly routine cost of doing business. However, some lawsuits have an impact that is far beyond the routine. They may start quietly or with a splash of headlines, but the results may impact the life or bottom line of a company, its products, services or practices, or the industry as a whole. Some companies survive such lawsuits, as Microsoft survived after the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuits in the 1990's. Other companies don’t, as witnessed by the original Napster
Legal Update: Where the Lawsuits Are
No full textThe legal drama has always been a popular television staple. From Perry Mason to L.A. Law to Boston Legal these shows feature fast-moving, hard driving lawyers who resolve their clients’ legal challenges in the space of an hour. Most of us know that the legal process takes more than an hour. But even real programming like Court TV or the O.J. Simpson trials don’t show the legal process at its most complex. While the Simpson trial went on for several weeks, there was a fairly clear-cut beginning (the Bronco chase), middle (Johnny Cochran and Judge Ito) and end (acquittal), over a fairly limited time frame of a few months. But lawsuits involving business or commercial interests are often conducted not over a period of months, but over a period of years. All three stages: beginning, middle and end, are often very protracted. The parties to the lawsuit generally expect that kind of time-frame. In some cases, they may even welcome it, or at least strategically plan for it. But for those outside of the lawsuit whose interests may be affected by the outcome, the wait can become confusing and frustrating
Information Supply and Demand: Resolving Sterelny’s Paradox of Cultural Accumulation
No full textGene-Culture Coevolution (GCC) theory is an intriguing new entry in the quest to understand human culture. Nonetheless, it has received relatively little philosophical attention. One notable exception is Kim Sterelny’s (2006) critique which raises three primary objections against the GCC account. Most importantly, he argues that GCC theory, as it stands, is unable to resolve “the paradox of cultural accumulation” (151); that while social learning should generally be prohibitively expensive for the pupils, it nonetheless occurs as the principle means of disseminating novel information through a culture. Sterelny holds that this is best explained by supplementing the GCC models with strong cultural group selection pressures. I argue that this is not needed. To show this I elaborate upon Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White’s (2001) information goods theory, developing it in terms of the market pressures that one would expect to find in an information economy. I indicate how such pressures contribute to an individual-level explanation of cultural accumulation that answers Sterelny’s concerns
Cleft Palate Course Pedagogy: Identifying and Eliminating Student Misconceptions
No full textInstructors of cleft palate and craniofacial courses have access to abundant content support. ACPA's "Core Curriculum for Cleft Palate and Other Craniofacial Disorders" (2002) is a well-conceived document, and exemplary textbooks and journal articles are available. Yet, it is puzzling when otherwise capable speech-language pathology students, (and even practicing clinicians), fail to integrate evidence-based content. Instead, their pre-course misconceptions prevail. This presentation offers a two-step approach to indentifying and eliminating student misconceptions
Ignorance and Indifference
No full textThe epistemic state of complete ignorance is not a probability distribution. In it, we assign the same, unique ignorance degree of belief to any contingent outcome and each of its contingent, disjunctive parts. That this is the appropriate way to represent complete ignorance is established by two instruments, each individually strong enough to identify this state. They are the principle of indifference (“PI”) and the notion that ignorance is invariant under certain redescriptions of the outcome space, here developed into the “principle of invariance of ignorance” (“PII”). Both instruments are so innocuous as almost to be platitudes. Yet the literature in probabilistic epistemology has misdiagnosed them as paradoxical or defective since they generate inconsistencies when conjoined with the assumption that an epistemic state must be a probability distribution. To underscore the need to drop this assumption, I express PII in its most defensible form as relating symmetric descriptions and show that paradoxes still arise if we assume the ignorance state to be a probability distribution. By separating out the different properties that characterize a probability measure, I show that the ignorance state is incompatible with each of the additivity and the dynamics of Bayesian conditionalization of the probability calculus
USA PATRIOT Act: What’s Next?
No full textAfter nearly a year of proposals and counter-proposals, two extensions, and ongoing behind the scenes negotiations, Congress passed two bills renewing the USA PATRIOT Act. President Bush signed the legislation only hours before the Act was set to expire. The USA PATRIOT Act was enacted weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks as a response to concerns about breakdowns in intelligence gathering that may have contributed to the attack. The Act was also intended to strengthen law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering tools to prevent future attacks. However, it has been criticized for threatening constitutional rights and civil liberties. This work examines the Act as well as some of the changes that were made when it was renewed. In addition, it considers what form the USA PATRIOT Act may take in the future and what debate may follo
Hang him high: The elevation of Jánošík to an ethnic icon
No full textIn this paper, Martin Votruba traces the evolution of the Jánošík myth. The highwayman Jánošík is a living legend in Czech, Polish, and Slovak cultures. Contrary to common claims, the modern celebratory myth of the brigand hanged in the eighteenth century is at odds with the traditional images of brigandage in the western Carpathians. Folk songs and The Hungarian Simplicissimus of the seventeenth century often anathematize highway robbery. High literature of the mostly Slovak counties of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Habsburg empire similarly cast Jánošík as a criminal. Yet some intellectuals, such as Pavol Jozef Šafárik, inspired by the robber in German literature, singled out Jánošík from among other brigands and reduced that folklore-based opprobrium. Others, such as Ján Kollár, resisted Jánošík's rehabilitation. Subsequent Central European national revivals and ethnic activism prompted the Slovak romantic poets to reinvent Jánošík as a folk rebel against social and ethnic oppression
Do the Causal Principles of Modern Physics Contradict Causal Anti-Fundamentalism?
No full textIn Norton(2003), it was urged that the world does not conform at a fundamental level to some robust principle of causality. To defend this view, I now argue that the causal notions and principles of modern physics do not express some universal causal principle, brought to light by discoveries in physics. Rather they merely assert that, according to relativity theory, spacetime has an invariant velocity, that of light; and that theories of matter admit no propagations faster than light. To appear in Causality: Historical and Contemporary. (provisional title) eds. P. K. Machamer and G. Wolters, University of Pittsburgh Press