Apple's China bargain is running out of time

Significance A major exception is Apple, for which China is both a major market and a global production base. The firm's activities in China have sparked controversies in both China and the West, but so far it has navigated them successfully. However, recent developments in China's internal environment and foreign relations make the situation more difficult. Impacts Apple's attempts to diversify its supply chain will create opportunities for other Asian countries. Apple's data activities in China will face scrutiny from overseas, potentially leading to regulatory or market responses. Apple will only retain the foundations of its integrated business model through rigorous compliance with Chinese legislation and regulation. Chinese-US political tension is here to stay; any major US firm with exposure to China is at risk of being used as a pressure point.

Tectonic Archaeology as a Foundation for Geoarchaeology

This article proposes a new subdiscipline, Tectonic Archaeology, based on the efforts of Japanese archaeologists to deal with the effects of earthquakes, volcanic tephra cover, and tsunami on archaeological sites. Tectonic Archaeology is conceived as an umbrella term for those efforts and as a foundation for Geoarchaeology in general. Comparisons distinguish between Geoarchaeology and Tectonic Archaeology, and a survey of major archaeological journals and textbooks reveals how the concept of ‘tectonics’ and specifically the processes of Plate Tectonics have been treated. Al-though the term ‘tectonics’ occurred fairly frequently, particularly as affecting coastlines and sea levels, it was not thoroughly defined and discussed. Volcanic activity was most mentioned in journals due to its provision of resources and modification of the landscape, while the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan seems to have stimulated more studies in Archaeoseismology. The textbooks were found to have scattered references to Plate Tectonic processes but no clear approach tying these together. The major exception is the Encyclopedia of Archaeology which addresses volcanoes, Archaeoseismology, and tsunami—soon to be linked together vis à vis Earth processes. Tectonic Archaeology attempts first to explain the processes of Plate Tectonics to underwrite investigation of their effects; it is applicable worldwide, in continental and coastal contexts.

Linguistic Silence and the Alienation of Female Characters in Ulysses and The Blind Owl

This article intends to demonstrate how female characters in Ulysses and The Blind Owl are deprived of full means of communication and expression. The connection with the concern with alienation in these two novels is that it is in the representation of female language that they show how characters—female characters and by extension women in general—are alienated from and marginalized by the masculine voices of the novels’ narrators and focalizers. It is noticeable that the narrative style of Ulysses and The Blind Owl, although very innovative and experimental, still allocates almost no space to female voices and language, with the major exception of Molly Bloom’s interior monologue. With the benefit of more recent perspectives, Molly’s narrative can be read as deriving in some ways (the lack of punctuation being one major indication) from the semiotic and subverting the established discipline of language use (the symbolic), thus, as an example of écriture féminine.

Variation in the Gallo-Romance left periphery

Exploiting parallels between nominal and clausal structures, it is argued that the strong / weak D dimension of parametric variation for nominals can be extended to clauses, such that V2 syntax can be reinterpreted as the reflex of a strong C setting. On this view, we observe in the history of most Gallo-Romance varieties a parametric shift from strong to weak C manifested in the loss of generalized V-to-C movement and the concomitant reassignment of the EPP edge-feature from CP to TP, as witnessed in the emergence of a dedicated preverbal subject position and reversal in the null-subject parameter. Within this scenario, it is shown that Gascon represents a major exception having uniquely retained its medieval V2 syntax and, indeed, further extended it to embedded contexts. In particular, in the passage from medieval to modern Gascon, the grammar has witnessed a radical change in the formal realization of the strong C head requirement (while the accompanying EPP edge-feature remains unchanged) such that strong C is no longer satisfied through the Move option raising the finite verb to the C position, but through the Merge option directly lexicalizing the latter position with a so-called ‘enunciative’ particle. This development is the result of intensive contact with Basque, a language independently known to present similar preverbal particles, highlighting how the medieval Gallo-Romance V2 constraint was exceptionally reinforced in this area, but at the same time aligned with a Basque model triggering a shift from the Move to the Merge options in satisfaction of strong C and the emergence of an elaborate system of C-particles.

Risk aversion in macaques in a freely moving patch-leaving foraging task

ABSTRACTAnimals, including humans, are risk-averse in most contexts. A major exception is the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta), which is robustly risk-seeking. Macaques‘ unique preferences may reflect their unique evolutionary history. Alternatively, they may derive from elements of task design associated with the demands of physiological recording, the source of nearly all macaque risk preference data. To disambiguate these possibilities we assessed macaques’ risk attitudes in a somewhat more naturalistic environment: subjects foraged at four feeding stations in a large enclosure. Stations (i.e. patches) provided either stochastically or non-stochastically depleting rewards. Subjects’ patch residence times were longer at safe than at risky stations, indicating a preference for safe options. This preference was not attributable to a win-stay-lose-shift heuristic. These findings highlight the lability of risk attitudes in macaques and support the hypothesis that observed differences between macaques and other species are ephemeral, not evolved.

Military Reform, Reciprocity, and Improved Treatment

This chapter examines captivity in the first two wars against Russia fought by the new Ottoman Regular army, in 1828–29 and 1853–56 (the Crimean War). We will see that the Ottoman prisoner-of-war system changed in response to the new incentives and interests created by the forces, as the Porte took conscious efforts to improve prisoners’ treatment in several ways. The result was that during the Crimean War, when the Ottoman alliance with France and Britain brought these three states’ captivity systems into contact with each other, all appeared roughly comparable in their basic structure. Both changes and continuities in this era drew on the Law of Release and the prisoner-of-war system established over the preceding century. Thus, while there were important changes, and convergences with European practices, Ottoman state interests and Russo-Ottoman legal traditions still remained paramount in governing captivity (with one major exception, to be discussed in Chapter 10).

Fair Use

Fair use is a longstanding, major exception to copyright owners’ exclusive rights. You do not infringe copyright if your copying of someone else’s work qualifies as fair use. I explained some fair use basics in Chapter I. Recall that to determine whether a...

Israeli Society and National Security

Chapter 5 presents the primary societal changes in Israel in recent decades and their ramifications for its national security. The motivation to serve and bear the defense burden, national security consensus, and societal resilience remain strong. Conversely, Israel has become two societies, one at the forefront of international technology; the other, largely the ultra-orthodox and Arab populations, lags behind and may cause an economic crisis. Deep divisions over the West Bank, the one major exception to the national security consensus, and fundamental cleavages over domestic issues erode Israel’s societal strength. Public, media, judicial, and market considerations increasingly constrain national security decision-making, as does the institutionalization of casualty aversion into the process. When an effective case is made, however, Israeli society remains highly supportive of military operations. Israeli politics have been stalemated over the West Bank issue for decades, and Israel has been unable to chart a clear national course.

Word versus Image

During news coverage of various events, images are treasured as important and even necessary—so much so that journalists—those whose livelihoods depend on the weight of the word—treat pictures as superior to words when they claim with conviction that, when tragedy strikes, the pictures write it best. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is the cliché of choice when we champion pictures for achieving what words fail to accomplish. While we often embrace the influence of the image, there is a major exception. When the dead enter the frame, our opinion of the news image dynamically flip-flops, revealing a remarkable anti-picture prejudice where words are now vastly preferred.

Origins of the Japanese Language

The Northeast Asia is one of the unique points on the globe where there are many language isolates and portmanteau families. From a conservative point of view, the Japanese language is a member of such a portmanteau family that has recently and increasingly been called Japonic in the Western literature. While Japanese is unquestionably a member of this Japonic language family, which consists of two Japanese languages (Japanese itself and the moribund Hachijō language) and four or five relatively closely related Ryūkyūan languages (Amami, Okinawan, Miyako, Yaeyama, and possibly Yonaguni), attempts have also been made to establish a genetic relationship between Japanese and various other language families. Most of these attempts have been amateurish, a major exception being the Koreo-Japonic hypothesis, which still remains unproven as well. It is also quite likely that the Japonic language family (or, more precisely, Insular Japonic) is the only linguistic grouping whose genetic relationship can be established beyond any doubt. A genetic relationship is also likely to exist between Japonic and a number of fragmentarily attested languages that once flourished in the south and center of the Korean Peninsula, but that died out no later than 9th century A.D. The paucity of material available does not allow one to establish solid predictive-productive regular correspondences in many cases, but intuitively the genetic relationship seems to be a matter of fact. Anything beyond intuition, however, lies in the realm of conjecture and speculation. The alleged Koreo-Japonic relationship is best explained by a centuries-long contact relationship rather than by common origin, given such factors as the virtual absence of any kind of shared paradigmatic morphology, as well as by multiple problems in establishing the real (and not imaginable or made-to-fit) regular correspondences. The Japanese-“Altaic” hypothesis is even more speculative and far-fetched. Consequently, the conclusion is that the Japanese language or the Japonic language family has no demonstrable relationship with any other language family or language isolate on the planet.