Designing education for life on earth

Designing, viewed broadly as the human capacity to link thought and action, has meaning and value in the world that transcends its material associations. Given the nature and urgency of current socioeconomic and ecological problems, the creative, generative concept of design must be made more accessible and useful. Accordingly, my intent is to dispel prevailing, narrow, specialist impressions of design and to advance in the public mind a larger concept that can influence deliberations and behavior in society-at-large. One of today's most critical areas of need, and one where I think design can make a particularly significant contribution, is education. A critical task for such design-based education is enabling people to design an ecologically and economically sustainable future.     

Literacy,technology and ‘technological literacy’

The shortcomings of the technological literacy metaphor are reviewed. The lack of an agreed meaning for this concept reflects a widespread perplexity about how the study of technology should be incorporated into general education. The paper considers how the study of literature and history might contribute to an understanding of technology and posits a framework which permits the study of the made world to be incorporated within a humanistic educational scheme. It is suggested that the historical study of technologies of literacy could play a significant role in curricular integration.Based on a Plenary Address to the second Domains of Literacy Conference:Literacies for a Productive Future Institute of Education London 1/9/94Michael Barnett has been, since 1992, Professor of Technology and Education at the Institute of Education in London University. Prior to that he was Reader in Physics at Imperial College London. His main scholarly activities are concerned with the history, philosophy and sociology of technology and their bearing on educational practice. He has established an MA programme in Technology and Education which reflects these concerns.     

Transfer sciences: management of distributed knowledge production

This paper is concerned to develop the notion of transfer science to take account of what is perceived to be the emergence of a new mode of knowledge production. The new mode which is characterised by the production of knowledge in the context of application, by transdisciplinarity, by homogeneity and organisational diversity, by enhanced social accountability and reflexivity, and by new forms of quality control. The thrust of the new mode of knowledge production is to call into question conventional notions of knowledge transfer and focuses instead on the organisational and managerial implications of the emergence of a socially distributed knowledge production system. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the policy implications of the emergence of the new mode of production. Needed in the new mode are science and technology policies which promote institutional permeability and policies which enable governments, acting through their civil service to act as brokers in the new knowledge production process. Such brokerage is necessary to enhance permeability between institutions within a particular country but also to increase co-operation and collaboration between institutions across countries.     

Portfolio Capital Flows: Hot or Cold?

A distinction is often made between short-term and long-termcapital flows: the former are deemed unstable hot money andthe latter are deemed stable cold money. Using time-series analysisof balance of payments data for five industrial and five developingcountries, we find that in most cases the labels "short-term"and "long-term" do not provide any information about the time-seriesproperties of the flow. In particular, long-term flows are oftenas volatile as short-term flows, and the time it takes for anunexpected shock to a flow to die out is similar across flows.long-term flows are also at least as unpredictable as short-termflows, and knowledge of the type of flow does not improve theability to forecast the aggregate capital account.     

The impact of tax on foreign direct investment: Empirical evidence and the implications for tax integration schemes

We estimate the impact of taxation on foreign direct investment (FDI) flows, using data on flows between seven countries for 1984 through 1989, and a sophisticated measure of the cost of capital. We find that the choice between domestic investment and total outward FDI is not significantly affected by taxation but that taxation does affect the location of outward FDI. These results are used to examine the impact of tax integration systems. Giving a tax credit to foreign shareholders may induce a large increase in inward FDI from exemption countries but not from partial-credit countries. For the United States, the total effect would be small.     

A discrete characterization of Slutsky symmetry

Summary A smooth demand function is generated by utility maximization if and only if its Slutsky matrix is symmetric and negative semidefinite. Slutsky symmetry is equivalent to absence of smooth revealed preference cycles, cf. Hurwicz and Richter (Econometrica 1979). To observe such a cycle would require a continuum of data. We characterize Slutsky symmetry by means of discrete antisymmetric revealed preference cycles consisting of either three or four observations.The first author's research was supported in part by NSF grant DMS-9401355, and the second author's by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, SFB 303, and by a SUNY Faculty Research award.     

Convergence of a branching type recursion with non-stationary immigration

The asymptotic distribution of a branching type recursion with non-stationary immigration is investigated. The recursion is given by , where (X _l ) is a random sequence, (L _n ⁻¹⁽¹⁾ ) are iid copies ofL _n−1,K is a random number andK, (L _n ⁻¹⁽¹⁾ ), {(X _l ),Y _n } are independent. This recursion has been studied intensively in the literature in the case thatX _l ≥0,K is nonrandom andY _n =0 ∀n. Cramer, Rüschendorf (1996b) treat the above recursion without immigration with starting conditionL ₀=1, and easy to handle cases of the recursion with stationary immigration (i.e. the distribution ofY _n does not depend on the timen). In this paper a general limit theorem will be deduced under natural conditions including square-integrability of the involved random variables. The treatment of the recursion is based on a contraction method. The conditions of the limit theorem are built upon the knowledge of the first two moments ofL _n . In case of stationary immigration a detailed analysis of the first two moments ofL _n leads one to consider 15 different cases. These cases are illustrated graphically and provide a straight forward means to check the conditions and to determine the operator whose unique fixed point is the limit distribution of the normalizedL _n .     

Ethics in business education: Working toward a meaningful reciprocity

This paper outlines and argues against some criticisms of business ethics education. It maintains that these criticisms have been put forward due to a misunderstanding of the nature of business and/or ethics. Business ethics seeks a meaningful reciprocity among economic, social and moral concerns. This demands that business organizations autonomously develop ethical goals from within, which in turn demands a reciprocity between ethical theory and practical experience. Working toward such a reciprocity, the ultimate goal of business ethics education is a moral business point of view through which one can live with integrity and fulfillment.To everyone who proposes to have a good career, moral philosophy is indispensible. Cicero, De Officiis, 44BC W. Michael Hoffman is Chair and Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Director at the Center for Business Ethics, Bentley College, Waltham, MA. He has received the following Grants: Council for Philosophical Studies, NEH Fellow, NDEA Fellow, Matchette. His most important publications are: Kant's Theory of Freedom: A Metaphysical Inquiry (UPA, 1979); Proceedings of the National Conferences on Business Ethics, 5 volumes (1977–1984); Business Ethics (McGraw-Hill, 1984) and articles in Journal of Business Ethics, Idealistic Studies, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Journal of Thought, The Journal for Critical Analysis, and The Southern Journal of Philosophy.Paper presented at the 16th Conference on Value Inquiry, entitled: Ethics and the Market Place: An Exercise in Bridge-Building or On the Slopes of the Interface.     

Is capitalism still viable?

This essay is an attempt to clarify the meaning of capitalism and to argue that this form of economic pattern will survive in the U.S. in the twentieth century. Capitalism should not be viewed as an abstraction which implies a religion, an ideology, a form of government, or a moral philosophy, but rather the private ownership of capital. Marx was wrong when he predicted the speedy decay of the capitalistic system in the West and when he claimed that a competitive system will lead to servitude and poverty for the masses; on the contrary, the American economic system is a grand success. Part of this success resulted from natural resources; part from America's being one of the largest free-trade areas; and part from the economic system, so-called capitalism, by which we have governed ourselves. The outcome is a greater measure of freedom, prosperity, leisure, and industrial sophistication. These achievements are hardly paralleled by any of the advanced countries of the world. Russell Kirk is a Distinguished Scholar of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. He is the author of twenty-three books and of several hundred essays. His books include The Conservative Mind; The Roots of American Order; and, recently, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning.This article was originally published in The Hillsdale Review. Copyright © 1982 by Hillsdale Review Inc.     

THE PLACE OF MANAGERS IN INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY

The discussion of industrial democracy in Britain has exploded in the last few years, but the result has been to write an agenda which has still to be worked through, not to reveal a consensus which can be written into action at once.