On Suffering and Sympathy: Jude the Obscure, Evolution and Ethics

This article links Thomas Hardy’s exploration of sympathy in Jude the Obscure to contemporary scientific debates over moral evolution. Tracing the relationship between pessimism, progressivism, and determinism in Hardy’s understanding of sympathy, it also considers Hardy’s conception of the author as enlarger of “social sympathies”--a position, I argue, that was shaped by Leslie Stephen’s advocacy of novel writing as moral art. Considering Hardy’s engagement with writings by Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and others, I explore the novel’s participation in a debate about the evolutionary significance of sympathy and its implications for Hardy’s understanding of moral agency. Hardy, I suggest, offered a stronger defence of morality based on biological determinism than Darwin, but this determinism was linked to an unexpected evolutionary optimism.

Ethics in the workplace

The right to request flexible working has been introduced into the UK employment laws against a background of post-fordist work practices, which already allow for employer rather than employee flexibility. This paper posits the idea that for the individual employee to benefit from these new rights what is required is the situation of dialogues within the workplace that take place in an ethical frame that recognises the employee as an individual.

rbcL sequences indicate a single evolutionary origin of multinucleate cells in the red algal tribe Callithamnieae.

In the Ceramiaceae, one of the largest families of the red algae, there are from 1 to 4000 nuclei in each vegetative cell, but each tribe is homogeneous with respect to the uninucleate/multinucleate character state, except for the Callithamnieae. The goals of this study were to analyze rbcL gene sequences to clarify the evolution of taxa within the tribe Callithamnieae and to evaluate the potential evolutionary significance of the development of multinucleate cells in certain taxa. The genus Aglaothamnion, segregated from Callithamnion because it is uninucleate, was paraphyletic in all analyses. Callithamnion (including Aristothamnion) was monophyletic although not robustly so, apparently due to variations between taxa in rate of sequence evolution. Morphological synapomorphies were identified at different depths in the tree, supporting the molecular phylogenetic analysis. The uninucleate character state is ancestral in this tribe. The evolution of multinucleate cells has occurred once in the Callithamnieae. Multiple nuclei in each cell may combine the benefits of small C values (rapid cell cycle) with large cells (permitting morphological elaboration) while maintaining a constant ratio of nuclear volume: cytoplasmic volume.

Software Release Planning: An Evolutionary and Iterative Approach

Abstract To achieve higher flexibility and to better satisfy actual customer requirements, there is an increasing tendency to develop and deliver software in an incremental fashion. In adopting this process, requirements are delivered in releases and so a decision has to be made on which requirements should be delivered in which release. Three main considerations that need to be taken account of are the technical precedences inherent in the requirements, the typically conflicting priorities as determined by the representative stakeholders, as well as the balance between required and available effort. The technical precedence constraints relate to situations where one requirement cannot be implemented until another is completed or where one requirement is implemented in the same increment as another one. Stakeholder preferences may be based on the perceived value or urgency of delivered requirements to the different stakeholders involved. The technical priorities and individual stakeholder priorities may be in conflict and difficult to reconcile. This paper provides (i) a method for optimally allocating requirements to increments; (ii) a means of assessing and optimizing the degree to which the ordering conflicts with stakeholder priorities within technical precedence constraints; (iii) a means of balancing required and available resources for all increments; and (iv) an overall method called EVOLVE aimed at the continuous planning of incremental software development. The optimization method used is iterative and essentially based on a genetic algorithm. A set of the most promising candidate solutions is generated to support the final decision. The paper evaluates the proposed approach using a sample project.