Search

To give a theoretical framework to measure the relative impact of bibliometric methodology on the subfields of a scientific discipline, and how that impact depends on the method of evaluation used to credit individual scientists with citations and publications. The authors include a study of the discipline of physics to illustrate the method. Indicators are introduced to measure the proportion of a credit space awarded to a subfield or a set of authors.

This paper gives the result of a 2007 survey of faculty at eight academic departments at Louisiana State University, asking them about the usefulness for their needs of an extension of the scholarly communication system by digital repositories. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

Our concern for nonhuman nature can be justified in terms of a human right to liberty of ecological conscience. This right is analogous to the right to religious liberty, and is equally worthy of recognition as that fundamental liberty. The liberty of ecological conscience, like religious liberty, is a negative right against interference. Each ecological conscience supports a claim to protection of the parts of nonhuman nature that are current or potential sites of its active pursuit of natural value. If we acknowledge the fallibility of each conscience in its pursuit of genuine natural value, a policy of indefinitely extensive conservation can be justified. Destruction of an object of current or potential natural value is like destroying a church, mosque, temple, or other holy place. This justification for environmental conservation is analogous to the standard justification for individual negative rights, as upheld by the liberal tradition of Locke, Mill, and Rawls.

By making use of a distinction between 'making something happen' and 'allowing it to happen,' a polluting act can be defined as making something happen with widely scattered externalized costs. Not all polluting acts are blameworthy, but we can investigate which polluting acts are sufficiently badly performed as to be blameworthy. This definition of polluting act permits us to justify the belief we often have that behavior concerning pollution may be blameworthy, even when we do not know whether the behavior caused harm.

Experiential or lived time (A-series time) can be many things. Gertrude Stein claims, in her 1935 Narration lectures, that experiential time is a plenum: all experiential time is full of vivid experience, if one is alert to perceive it. Stein, however, then poses a problem of narration that seems to obstruct poetic access to this vivid plenum. Bernadette Mayer and Lisa Jarnot take up Stein's challenge with time-defined and time-filling poetic writing processes. Much like children, these processes can come to have their own experiential times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]