WHAT IS THE MULTITUDE?

Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman continue their conversation with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. (See ‘The Global Coliseum: On Empire’ in Cultural Studies, 16.2, (March 2002), p. 177–192). In this new interview they press the authors of Empire and Multitude on questions that have arisen both out of their own involvement with the theoretical issues generated by Empire and from new areas opened up by Multitude. Why is the multitude not a class? How can the unity of a political project be maintained in the multiplicity of the multitude? Is democracy still a project for the future? Can a political subject constitute itself outside the structure of sovereignty? In other words, what is the multitude?     

Badiou and the philosophy of social work: a reply to Stephen Webb

Imre R. Badiou and the philosophy of social work: a reply to Stephen Webb Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 253–258 © 2010 The Author, Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. Stephen Webb's recent article ‘Against diversity and difference in social work’ claims that the work of Alain Badiou has the potential to be of great use in social work practice. Webb is faced with the problem of a discourse that has eroded any practical meaning attached to notions of diversity and difference, he laments the ‘ethical turn’ in social work practice and blames post‐modernism. Webb views the work of Badiou as a way to reinvigorate social work practice. I claim that Badiou's Being and Event is exclusive to ontology. Connections between Being and Event and possible ‘uses’ of Badiou's subtractive ontology, as an instrumentalisation, are not worthwhile. Critiquing Badiou's non‐ontological philosophies and political polemics is a better way to assess the practicality of his thought outside of his ontology. Webb's conflation of post‐modernism, neoliberalism and the difference, diversity and ethics discourse is also problematic and is critiqued here.     

Non-native plant species integrate well into plant-pollinator networks in a diverse man-made flowering plant community

Urban Ecosystems - Urban green areas offer diverse flower resources for pollinators. Yet, the role of non-native plant species in local plant-pollinator networks is understudied. We explored the...     

A vendor–purchaser economic lot size problem with remanufacturing

In this paper, we study a closed-loop supply chain in which a single purchaser orders a particular product from a single vendor and sells it on the market. A certain fraction of used items return from the market back to the purchaser, who is responsible for collecting and returning them to the vendor. In addition to manufacturing new items, the vendor is able to remanufacture the returns into as-good-as-new items which are subsequently used to serve market demand. Our framework features the conventional joint economic lot size (JELS) model extended to include the return flow of the used items. In line with the assumptions of the JELS model, we assume a deterministic constant demand for the product. The fraction of used items returning from the market is assumed to depend on the purchaser’s collection effort. To stimulate the returns, the vendor may offer the purchaser a transfer payment per item returned. The questions addressed by this study pertain to the optimal centralised control of this closed-loop supply chain, to the individually optimal policies of its members, and to the coordination within this supply chain under a decentralised control. In particular, we show that the transfer payment alone cannot coordinate the supply chain under consideration and may even fail to do so when combined with a two-part tariff—which is otherwise known to coordinate the corresponding forward supply chain. Our numerical study, though, has revealed that the combined contract is capable of substantially reducing the coordination deficit. We also introduce a novel three-part tariff which is shown to enable supply chain coordination in combination with the transfer payment.     

Smoothing spline growth curves with covariates

We adapt the interactive spline model of Wahba. to growth curves o with covariates. The smoothing spline formulation permits a nonpara-metric representation of the growth curves. In the limit when the discretization error is small relative to the estimation error, the resulting growth curve estimates often depend only weakly on the number and locations of the knots. The smoothness parameter is determined from the data by minimizing an empirical estimate of the expected error. We show that the risk estimate of Craven and Wahba is a weighted goodness of fit estimate, A modified loss estimate is given, where a2 is replaced by its unbiased estimate.     

‘SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGES OF THOUGHT’: EMPIRE'S INSERTS

Scattered throughout Hardt and Negri's Empire are a number of short sections whose manifesto-like energy contrasts with the relatively expository style of the main text. These passages, modeled after the scholie of Spinoza's Ethics, are meant to suggest new ways of thinking about material already presented, to highlight the affective aspect of the material, and to point to hidden connections among different discursive elements. Several of these which did not appear in the published version of Empire for reasons of space are published here for the first time. The matters touched on are as diverse as those in Empire itself: Totality as a philosophical problem, the gender of biopolitical production, the relationship between genocide and the nationstate, the possibility of hope; the paradoxes of unemployment, the function of fear, postmodern prophecy,Hollywood's imperial fantasy, and the paradoxical relationship between being-against and love that has puzzled and fascinated many of Empire's readers.     

Acceptance of democracy and public relations: Attitudes in a transitional country

The study explores the relationship between acceptance of democracy and opinions about public communication used by the private sector in television newscasts in Croatia, a country transitioning to democracy. A survey administered to students at a large University in Zagreb found inconsistent responses to the items that measured acceptance of democracy, indicating that young Croatians in the study may still be in a political “gray zone” and may not have a full understanding of the precepts of democracy. However, there was a positive correlation between opinions about public relations media practices and acceptance of democracy. The study suggests that it is not enough to use a theoretical framework of global public relations that characterizes a country as a democracy or not, but rather to recognize that democratization is a process. Many people in transitional societies may be closer on the continuum to traditional communist points of view than to newer democratic views; such understanding can help provide a theoretical understanding of transitional public relations.