Academic literature on the topic 'Radical Commodities'

This chapter discusses the continued decline of amateurism during the late 1960s and 1970s. Soaked in the countercultural spirit of the era, movements around the world challenged social norms and social order, often through radical and subversive efforts. The sustained push for civil rights along racial, gender, and social lines powerfully exposed the system of inequality in capitalist societies. Amateur sport was not immune to emerging cultural movements that challenged exploitation and threatened the status quo. Hair gradually lengthened as athletes questioned the authority of coaches and ad

Many people today have never heard of the Comoros, but these islands were once part of a prosperous economic system that stretched halfway around the world. A key node in the trading networks of the Indian Ocean, the Comoros thrived by exchanging slaves and commodities with African, Arab and Indian merchants. By the seventeenth century, the archipelago had become an important supply point on the route from Europe to Asia, and developed a special relationship with the English. The twentieth century brought French colonial rule and a plantation economy based on perfumes and spices. In 1975, foll

The key to market risk is the calculation of position risk requirement (PRR). Basel 3 has radically changed the approach to the calculation of position risk for regulated firms, and this chapter deals with the ‘before and after’ element to it. A firm must calculate a PRR in respect of all its trading book positions, all foreign exchange positions, and all positions in commodities (including physical commodities) whether or not in the trading book. A firm must also be able to monitor its total PRR on an intra-day basis. The remainder of the chapter covers trading book eligibility under Basel 2.

This chapter turns on the concept ofsensationto sketch some of the ways plants are caught up in contemporary biopolitics. Specifically, the idea of the floral sensation both describes the spectacular qualities of (some) plants that make them particularly desirable commodities in the global floral industry, and gestures to recent research that indicate that plantshavesensations that are both similar to and radically different from human ones. Together, these meanings demonstrate that plants are extensively implicated in biopolitical relations, but as agents with specific capacities rather than

AbstractThis contribution analyzes guidebooks that deal specifically with keeping a writer’s notebook, a process-document that may elude the common association of creative writing with its published literary commodities. Creative writing’s pedagogical question “can it be taught?” is complicated since this “it” is so poorly codified by the notebook. I consider three groupings of advice in the notebook-guidebooks in relation to that complexity and discuss their uselessness where writing invents part of its pedagogical needs only in the process of its own happening. Firstly, the guidebooks take on a radical process-pedagogical approach. They promote a kind of irresolute and unpredictable (“end-less”) writing that discovers its objects in the event of their coming-to-be, instead of hypothesizing them beforehand. Note-taking appears here as a self-creative event rather than a preplanned act—a means without an end. Secondly, rather than providing poietic writing recipes, the guidebooks give advice on writerly attitudes or dispositions. The elements of art are presented as existing latently in the world and the practice of note-keeping orients their drawing-out and literary becoming since its technology straddles the contextual and the textual (“creative receptivity”). Thirdly, when addressing the move from the notebook’s writing-for-writing’s sake toward an eventual literary commodity, the guidebooks resist concluding writing’s “invention phase” absolutely. Rereading and rewriting in the notebook continue to inform events that exceed and requalify the intermediate junctures of the literary work’s development (“besideness”).

This chapter explores the interrelation between the everyday object and the art object in the work of New York Dada poet, pioneer assemblage sculptor and performance artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Her intermedial poetics revolves around an unprecedented intrusion of quotidian objects and mass-produced commodities in art and poetry, while her hybrid forms radically redefine both the visual artwork and the poem and do away with the boundaries between different kinds of artistic objects. This chapter situates her artistic practice in the context of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, while making important distinctions between them. Although the Baroness’ assemblages have been eclipsed by Duchamp’s work, she came up with a strikingly original poetics that is literally “ready-to-wear,” integrating singular arrays of objects into her radical self-performances which work toward developing new genres such as a living body assemblage or a body performance poem. This chapter argues that in Baroness Elsa’s “ready-to-wear” poem-objects unravels a radical and ironic craft which inextricably welds together the consumer product and the unique artwork.

Business communication is comprised of standards designed for efficiency. Like commodities, official correspondences are often indistinguishable. Adherence to templates provides uniformity in arrangement if not also content. When this approach works well, it is both efficient and effective. However, the universal applicability of this paradigm is suspect. Such standardization stifles creativity. When one is responsible for communicating insights in business, a radical break with convention might be beneficial in terms of gaining attention and provoking thought. Deviating from established norms is risky. Further, while one learns key tenants of business communication at work and in college, one is seldom informed as to when to stop following the rules and forge a new communicative path forward. In this chapter, existential insights are combined with communication theory to illustrate how authentic organizational communication can assist in one becoming who one is while also communicating insights in a business in a way that the form and content are strategically aligned.

Competition over natural resources has figured prominently among explanations of armed conflicts, from Malthusian fears of population growth and land scarcity to national security interests over resources defined as “strategic” because of their industrial or military use, such as oil and uranium. Access to natural resources and the transformation of nature into tradable commodities are deeply political processes, in which military force can play a role of domination or resistance. Armed separatism within Indonesia and Nigeria, annexation attempts on Kuwait and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, protracted civil wars in Angola and the Philippines, and coups d’état in Iran and Venezuela have all incorporated important resource dimensions. Arguably, the radical Islamic terrorism that has affected the United States since the early 1990s is to some extent an oil-related “blowback”: U.S. military deployment in Saudi Arabia, criticisms against the corruption of the Gulf regimes, and ironically, part of the funding made available to terrorist groups. This chapter examines relations between resources and armed conflicts, with a focus on commodities legally traded on international markets (thereby excluding drugs, as well as water and land involved, for example, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) and on extracted resources such as oil, minerals, and timber, in particular. Beyond a simple reading of so-called resource wars as violent modes of competitive behavior, this chapter argues that resource exploitation and the resource dependence of many producing countries play a role in shaping incentives and opportunities of uneven development, misgovernance, coercive rule, insurrection, and foreign interference. This relationship, however, is not systematic: history, political culture, institutions, and regional neighborhoods, as well as a country’s place in the international economy, all play a part these relations. The incorporation of resources into an armed conflict has also specific implications upon its course through their influence on the motivations, strategies, and capabilities of belligerents. Military targets often consist of commercial business opportunities rather than political targets, while the cost of engaging adversaries may be calculated in terms of financial reward.

Huge amount of liquidity flows into a number of financial instruments such as stocks, commodities, currencies, futures, and so on every day. Investment decisions are mainly based on predicting the future movements of the instrument(s) in question. However, high frequency financial data are somewhat hard to model or predict. It would be valuable information for the investor if he or she knew which financial instruments were quantitatively more predictable. The data used in the model consisted of intraday frequencies covering the period between 1993 and 2013. An Artificial Neural Network model using Radial Basis Functions containing only past data of three different types of instruments (stocks, currencies, and commodities) to predict future high values on six different frequencies was applied. A total of 72 different artificial neural networks representing 12 different instruments were trained five times each, and their prediction performances were recorded on average. Considerably clear distinctions were observed on prediction performances of different financial instruments.