Academic literature on the topic 'Trace level speculation'

Smith & Wood’s Employment Law draws on the extensive teaching and practical experience of its authors to provide students with a clear explanation of essential legislation and case detail while also offering incisive academic commentary and critical detail to help with essay preparation and class work. Throughout the book, topics are carefully explained in their social and historical context, providing readers with an insight into the fast-paced development of employment law and offering perceptive analysis of its future direction. This fourteenth edition has been produced against the back

The North American Lake Superior region contains a world-class copper province nearly 300,000 km² in area. A dozen major copper deposits and hundreds of smaller mineral accumulations are located in Michigan, Minnesota, and Ontario (Morey and Sims 1996), many of which include As, nickel (Ni), platinum (Pt), palladium (Pd), Co, Mo, and Fe, as well as Cu (Nicholson et al. 1992). Historically, the province has hosted a variety of life forms; fossil biota have been traced as far back as 2.6-2.75 Ga. Palynological and microbial research (Robbins 1985, Robbins et al. 1994) prompts speculation about possible correlations between copper and the biota that evolved there. Because the region has been subjected to continental collisions, volcanism, glaciation, rifting, weathering, sea level rise and fall, waxing and waning of lakes, soil formation, and now to human settlement and development including mining, the fossil record is discontinuous. This review of the geologic formations in the Lake Superior region from the Precambrian to the present, and their copper and biotic occurrences and associations, attempts to illuminate some of those geologic/ biologic correlations, and includes mention of modern environmental concerns. Copper is one of nearly 75 chemical elements contributing to metabolic or structural functions of organisms (Dexter-Dyer et al. 1984). Bioassimilation varies and depends not only on availability from the environment, but also on the species, gender, and age of organism with specific concentrations also depending on diet, health, tissue assayed, and various synergisms with other trace elements such as Fe and Zn. Indeed, copper is an essential element and co-factor contributing to copper-associated polypeptides that provide catalytic and electron transfer functions in almost every known group of organisms alive today, from bacteria to humans. Copper proteins contribute to skin pigmentation, nerve coverings, and in mechanisms of development, maintenance, and repair of connective tissues important for well-functioning cardiovascular systems (Eisler 2000). Presently, over two dozen essential copper proteins, some with porphyrin-copper functional groups (similar to the porphyrin-iron association in hemoglobin), have been identified, each with its specific developmental or physiological function (Cowan 1998).

In this chapter, the author discusses some recent evidence for the appearance of what appears to be a capacity for complex relational decision-making in the human evolutionary record. Unlike compassion and latent forms of justice known as inequity aversion, finding any traces of wisdom in the lives of other animals is much harder to discern. Some debates on animal intelligence and shared intention provide clues when comparing different primates, including humans and other social animals. Using the work of twentieth-century Jewish philosophers, including Hans Jonas, consideration is given as to how far and in what sense modern humans became doubly wise, Homo sapiens sapiens. It is suggested that this is a becoming wise in community with other hominins and other species, and is determined through a discussion of the different elements of practical wisdom that has been alluded to by the ancients. The faint traces left behind in the evolutionary record show both a sporadic and sometimes inconsistent pattern of distinctively human mental abilities, particularly those related to those elements of practical wisdom that in classic Thomistic thought were recognized as foresight (providentia) and memory (memoria). How far and in what sense such a process also aligned with a receptivity to the divine is difficult to judge, though it seems likely that humans reached a level of fairly sophisticated and consistent wisdom before they became conscious of divine agency. Wisdom, as an intellectual virtue of speculative reason, first required the imaginative capacity to speculate, but that capacity did not emerge in isolation, but in community with other species.

In Chapter 5, the authors give shape to an approach called Storiation. Central to Storiation is registering the ongoing afterlives, hauntings and effects of such significant forces as colonialism, modernity, global warming, nuclear radiation, rising sea levels, and waste production; where islands and island cultures regularly emerge as important sites for investigation. What distinguishes the Storiation analytic is the holding together of entities and effects, registered through islands and islander lives, intra-actions and effects. For authors like Timothy Morton the (island) future then becomes entangled with the past as the ‘afterlife’ of relational effects continue to reverberate in ‘strange’, ‘weird’ or ‘quantum’ ways. The chapter examines how the analytic of Storiation is today being widely developed in Anthropocene philosophy, critical Black and Indigenous Studies which all increasing turn to engage islands as key sites of relational entanglements and associated island scholars and literatures. Of particular importance is the work of the Barbadian writer Kamau Brathwaite. Brathwaite’s onto-epistemology of ‘tidalectics’ profoundly disrupts mainland, continental and modern frameworks of space-time, and binaries of human/nature. In Tiffany Lethabo King’s Storiations of Black and Indigenous life, she employs such methods as ‘critical fabulation’ and ‘speculative bricolage’ in order to hold together the traces, ghosts and afterlives of colonialism embodied and constitutive of the present. Thus, the chapter charts Storiations of the differentiating powers of colonialism, of the emergence of tidalectic psychologies living on in the wake, of island dances, Vodou loa and shamanistic practices, of species long extinct, of the consumerisms that haunt islands in strange ways.

The reason for tracing in this chapter the history of cycles, as a prelude to speculating about the future, lies in two features of cyclical history: the fact that this history includes the global depression of the 1930s that helped trigger World War II and the fact that a number of economists have underlined the role of population increase, stagnation, or decline in determining the length and amplitude of depressions and of cycles themselves. Cycles viewed historically, then, are not irrelevant to the issues of the next century. Trend periods, treated in Chapter 4, have a rhythm that runs through a series of business cycles. Trend periods affect the price level, interest rates, terms of trade, capital movements, and direction of migration. Business cycles, unlike trend periods, consist of fluctuations in employment and output. The length and intensity of businesscycle upswings —and the extent of overshooting they yield —are partially determined by the time lags involved in the particular leading sectors of the boom. The shortness of the inventory cycle—about three years — is related to the simple fact that inventories have a short life. Unlike a factory, a road, or a house, they are used up rather promptly in the production process. Inventory overshooting, therefore, tends to be capable of correction fairly soon. Housing stands at the other extreme. Houses last a generation, and their replacement (relative to inventories) is more postponable. Against this brief background, the character and timing of businesscycle patterns are examined in four periods: the 18th century, 1783— 1914, the interwar years, and post-1945. Then the cyclical problem as now foreseen for 1996-2050 will be discussed. Britain is the only country where business fluctuations in the 18th century have been examined in a reasonably systematic, if still exploratory, way. Moreover, Britain gained primacy in the course of the 18th century and remained at the heart of global cyclical fluctuations through about 1914. T. S. Ashton's chronology of turning points in British business fluctuations of the 18th century is given in Table 5.1.