To appove or not to approve: this is not the only question

This paper deals with electing candidates. In elections voters are frequently offered a small set of actions (voting in favor of one candidate, voting blank, spoiling the ballot, and not showing up). Thus voters can express neither a negative opinion nor an opinion on more than one candidate. Approval voting partially fills this gap by asking an opinion on all candidates. Still the choice is only between approval and non approval. However non approval may mean disapproval or just indifference or even absence of suffcient knowledge for approving the candidate. In this paper we characterize the dis&approval voting rule, a natural extension of approval voting that distinguishes between indifference and disapproval.

Rights of Portugal, in reference to Great Britain and the question of the slave trade, or, the manifesto and protest of the weak, against the ingratitude, oppression, and violence of the strong ...

Enquanto os políticos e diplomatas polemizavam e agiam, Thomas Buxton publicava, depois de viajar ao Brasil e ao Caribe, o mais completo levantamento sobre o tráfico negreiro jamais feito até então.

L'Oyapoc et l'Amazone : question brésilienne et française

Joaquim Nabuco não teve êxito na defesa dos limites do Brasil com a a Guiana Inglesa, no juízo arbitral presidido pelo Rei da Itália. No entanto, o atlas com o qual ilustrou a sua argumentação é um importante trabalho da cartografia histórica, hoje muito raro.

The question of cultural transfer: Martial arts fiction in English translation

Santamaría, José Miguel; Pajares, Eterio; Olsen, Vickie; Merino, Raquel; Eguíluz, Federico (eds.)

Overfishing, uncertainty, and ocean governance: Lord Perry's question revisited

“Why does overfishing persist in the face of regulation?” The author argues that over fishing,a fundamental cause of the crisis facing our oceans, is the result of the failure of our fishing management agencies (ultimately our politicians and communities) to embrace a small suite of powerful tools (more correctly strategic approaches) which have been developed to account for uncertainty. Broad success in managing fisheries to achieve sustainability goals will only come if these tools are enthusiastically applied. This will not happen until organisational cultures within fishery management agencies undergo a major shift leading to an asset-based biodiversity conservation, rather than resource exploitation, to be placed at the centre of ocean governance.This thesis examines these issues in the context of case studies covering regional, national and provincial (State) fishery management agencies. With the exception of the case study of a regional fishery (the southern ocean krill fishery) all case studies are drawn from Australian experiences. The central recommendation of the thesis is that fishery management agencies, worldwide, should be replaced by biodiversity asset management agencies.

How far from Jerusalem? Tropical customs and the question of race in the Book of John Mandeville

The Book of John Mandeville, while ostensibly a pilgrimage guide documenting an English knight’s journey into the East, is an ideal text in which to study the developing concept of race in the European Middle Ages. The Mandeville-author’s sense of place and morality are inextricably linked to each other: Jerusalem is the center of his world, which necessarily forces Africa and Asia to occupy the spiritual periphery. Most inhabitants of Mandeville’s landscapes are not monsters in the physical sense, but at once startlingly human and irreconcilably alien in their customs. Their religious heresies, disordered sexual appetites, and monstrous acts of cannibalism label them as fallen state of the European Christian self. Mandeville’s monstrosities lie not in the fantastical, but the disturbingly familiar, coupling recognizable humans with a miscarriage of natural law. In using real people to illustrate the moral degeneracy of the tropics, Mandeville’s ethnography helps shed light on the missing link between medieval monsters and modern race theory.

Projective Limit Random Probabilities on Polish Spaces

A pivotal problem in Bayesian nonparametrics is the construction of prior distributions on the space M(V) of probability measures on a given domain V. In principle, such distributions on the infinite-dimensional space M(V) can be constructed from their finite-dimensional marginals---the most prominent example being the construction of the Dirichlet process from finite-dimensional Dirichlet distributions. This approach is both intuitive and applicable to the construction of arbitrary distributions on M(V), but also hamstrung by a number of technical difficulties. We show how these difficulties can be resolved if the domain V is a Polish topological space, and give a representation theorem directly applicable to the construction of any probability distribution on M(V) whose first moment measure is well-defined. The proof draws on a projective limit theorem of Bochner, and on properties of set functions on Polish spaces to establish countable additivity of the resulting random probabilities.

Disease problems in shrimp sector in Khulna district of Bangladesh: a question of sustainability

Disease is the main restraining factor for the development of shrimp sector in Bangladesh. Both brackish water shrimp bagda (Penaeus monodon) and freshwater prawn golda, (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) farming in Bangladesh have been facing disease problem. A study on disease outbreak in both brackish water and freshwater small-scale shrimp farms (gher) in Khulna district was carried out through interviewing randomly selected 3-5% of shrimp farmers with a structured questionnaire during March to December, 2002. The study showed that 97% bagda farming ghers and 80% golda farming ghers were affected by disease. White spot disease was the severe disease for bagda, whereas, antenna rot was the main disease for freshwater prawn. Change of water and liming were carried out as control measures of disease for bagda shrimp farming, while it was only liming for golda farming. A small number of shrimp farmers (15%) used chemicals for treatment of shrimp diseases. Development of suitable farming technology to prevent disease contamination and innovation of proper treatments for diseases are required to overcome the disease problems for sustainable shrimp farming in Bangladesh.

Exploitation of linguistic ambiguity in Polish and English jokes

English & Polish jokes based on linguistic ambiguity are constrasted. Linguistic ambiguity results from a multiplicity of semantic interpretations motivated by structural pattern. The meanings can be "translated" either by variations of the corresponding minimal strings or by specifying the type & extent of modification needed between the two interpretations. C. F. Hockett's (1972) translatability notion that a joke is linguistic if it cannot readily be translated into other languages without losing its humor is used to interpret some cross-linguistic jokes. It is claimed that additional intralinguistic criteria are needed to classify jokes. By using a syntactic representation, the humor can be explained & compared cross-linguistically. Since the mapping of semantic values onto lexical units is highly language specific, translatability is much less frequent with lexical ambiguity. Similarly, phonological jokes are not usually translatable. Pragmatic ambiguity can be translated on the basis of H. P. Grice's (1975) cooperative principle of conversation that calls for discourse interpretations. If the distinction between linguistic & nonlinguistic jokes is based on translatability, pragmatic jokes must be excluded from the classification. Because of their universality, pragmatic jokes should be included into the linguistic classification by going beyond the translatability criteria & using intralinguistic features to describe them.

Osobliwości środkowoeuropejskiej przestrzeni literackiej: ironiczni moraliści i ludyczni myśliciele

Autorka, stawiając pytanie o zasadność pojęcia Europy Środkowej, przypomina historię różnic poglądowych pomiędzy czeskimi a polskimi uczonymi na temat (nie)istnienia wspólnoty na tym terytorium: ci pierwsi w XIX wieku głosili ideę panslawizmu, w 30-tych latach XX wieku potrzebę syntezy kultur i literatur słowiańskich, a po II wojnie światowej przeciwstawiali słowiańskość Zachodowi, co wywoływało krytykę tych drugich. Stąd wynika odmienne rozumienie obszaru środkowoeuropejskiego – w Czechach przeważnie lokowanego w granicach Austro-Węgier, zaś w Polsce pojmowanego znacznie szerzej. Natomiast pewnego rodzaju spójny wyróżnik Europy Środkowej można znaleźć w literaturze, przytaczany bywa szczególnie gatunek powieści (np. Kafki, Haška, Musila, Gombrowicza), poprzedzony – jak przypomina autorka – polską gawędą i popularnym w Polsce szkicem fizjologicznym. Zawarty w nich element humoru, przeszedł w stadium satyry, a następnie groteski, tworząc dzięki temu niepowtarzalny odcień humoru środkowoeuropejskiego, często określanego jako drugi wyróżnik omawianego terytorium. Zdaniem autorki, środkowoeuropejska specyfika ściśle związana jest z kodem euroatlantyckim, a w tym właśnie kontekście zawsze powinna być rozpatrywana.

Dialogic Signals In Argumentative Discussions of Advanced Polish Learners Of English

The first part of the paper deals with characteristics of classroom interaction as a type of institutional talk in a conversational analytic perspective. Next, the thesis is discussed concerning developing learners' interactional competence to foster learner discursive independence in argumentative discussions in English as a foreign language. Finally, after a short review of dialogic signals, the article presents a preliminary analysis of selected dialogic signals: evaluating reformulations and piggybacking as the ways of achieving reciprocity in argumentative discussions.

Dialogic Signals In Argumentative Discussions of Advanced Polish Learners Of English

The first part of the paper deals with characteristics of classroom interaction as a type of institutional talk in a conversational analytic perspective. Next, the thesis is discussed concerning developing learners' interactional competence to foster learner discursive independence in argumentative discussions in English as a foreign language. Finally, after a short review of dialogic signals, the article presents a preliminary analysis of selected dialogic signals: evaluating reformulations and piggybacking as the ways of achieving reciprocity in argumentative discussions.

Transformation from natural (thermal contraction) to anthropogenic (resource exploitation) depressions in the Krotoszyn-Koźmin-Raszków area (Polish Lowland)

An exceptional concentration of almost identical depressions exist near the small towns of Krotoszyn, Koźmin and Raszków (southern Wielkopolska). Their origin is, however, different from that of the typical post glacial-relief: they are Man-made enlarged thermal-contraction structures that developed at the very end of the Middle Polish (Warthian) glaciation and during the North Polish (Weichselian) glaciation, most probably under periglacial conditions.