Recruitment and Use of Child Soldiers in Afghanistan: Cultural Traits as Pivotal Factor

This paper explores the cultural values that prevailed in Afghanistan to understand the recruitment and use of underage soldiers in the long-lasting armed conflict while comparing the existing domestic and international law. The study analyzed the effect of the traditions of Afghans on child soldiering. The method was doctrinal, and therefore, the collected and analyzed data was qualitative. The analysis was thematical, where each related idea was subjected to review and evaluation. The research found that since time immemorial, the Afghan culture traditions were conducive to underage soldiering for various reasons, including peace and justice where male and female child warriors are treated as heroes, perhaps more than any other member of the Afghan society. Due to the stated reasonings, the study established that more underage soldiers were used and recruited during the period of the British Empire, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the civil war that caused the Taliban and Northern Alliance to resume control and in the post 9/11 phase of armed conflict in Afghanistan irrespective of domestic and international law that prohibited the recruitment and use of underage soldiers as it violated their basic fundamental rights of childhood.

The Effect of Gamified Teamwork on Business-related Idea Generation

Innovation providing a competitive advantage to enterprises is based on original ideas usually developed by teams. Therefore, the optimization of idea generation in teams is crucial for the enterprises’ competitiveness and survival. The goal of this experimental study is to test whether idea generation in team can be made more effective in terms of quantity and quality through gamification (the use of game design elements in non-game contexts). Based on conservation of resources theory, in the present study gamification was assumed to generate and regulate task-related resources and therefore to increase the number and originality of generated ideas. 170 students divided in 70 teams were asked to imagine themselves to be a management team of a young innovative enterprise during a crisis meeting and to generate solutions for the described problems. 35 teams were randomly assigned to the gamification condition and another 35 teams to the control condition. The number and originality of ideas were evaluated by two independent condition-blind raters and compared between the conditions. Gamification has a large positive effect on the idea number and a medium-sized positive effect on the idea originality. The findings, implications and limitations are discussed.

The Greenwich Meridian of Literature and the „Peripheries” of World Literature: Lu Xun’s Alternative Cartography

The article discusses Pascale Casanova’s mapping of world literature according to a division into center and peripheries, focusing on her idea of the Greenwich Meridian of literature as a spatial and temporal measure of the world’s literary production. The related idea of literary consecration of peripheral writers is explained. The possibility of an alternative cartography that emphasizes literary transfers via translations between peripheries is analyzed on the basis of the famous modern Chinese writer Lu Xun’s theoretical and translation output. His practice of translating peripheral writers, often carried out second-hand via German editions, potentially challenges popular contemporary mappings of literary space such as those developed by P. Casanova and F. Moretti.

Calling Time Out in Doha: The Seiko Block Camera and Image Ethics

In an effort to put more eyeballs on television sets, and in an attempt to reinvigorate a sport long beleaguered by doping scandals, recent questions surrounding female sponsorships, and a vanishing audience, the International Association of Athletic Federations unveiled a new camera designed by Seiko during the September 2019 World Championships held in Doha, Quatar. The idea was to add to an immersive experience, offering unparalleled views of sprinters at the moment they exploded from the starting blocks. Like many things during the Doha meet, the effort became an ending to a bad joke. Rather than getting to the heart of the event, the camera’s focus was a bit lower; the Seiko angle became known derisively as the crotch shot. After objections by two female German sprinters the positioning of the camera angle (specifically what would be shown when) was reconsidered, reframed, and essentially retired. Control of the body, including how it is observed, and the closely related idea of the control of one’s image are bound by certain ethical dimensions, particularly when that control is violated or profited from by outside parties. This paper interrogates how those concerns may be ameliorated by embracing an ethics of care.

What Luck!

Who is the luckiest person in the world? What do we mean by ‘luck’? Luck is usually treated as something persistent, a quality that attaches to people, places or objects. We feel that luck should be balanced, that the wheel of fortune should always rotate to balance things out, but it doesn’t. Fate is a powerful and related idea that destiny pre-ordains the course of our lives. Fortune-telling techniques purport to get a glimpse of fate and to see hidden truths. Somewhat paradoxically, most kinds of divination make use of random methods. The paradox of fairness is explained. It seems, though, that what distinguishes self-described lucky people from those who consider themselves unlucky is a question of attitude, of how one interprets the chance events that have filled our lives.

Strategy and Semiosis: Insights from Operation Fortitude

The European summer of 1944 saw what is arguably the greatest deception wrought through deliberate miscommunication. Operation Fortitude focussed on convincing the Nazis that the invasion of Europe would come not at Normandy but further north at the Pas-de-Calais. Seeing the enemy almost completely wrong-footed, Fortitude remains the most devastating deception in the history of warfare. It is also a campaign that teaches us a great deal about the internal dynamics and semiotics of strategy more generally. Accordingly, I propose that Operation Fortitude speaks profoundly to the principle of polysemy and to the related idea that, in competitive fields, strategic design may see to it that we are deceived into misreading tactics in relation to their informing concepts. Directly related to the above, the paper proposes that, since it is always founded upon a more or less difficult-to-fathom conceptual core, all strategy inevitably deceives—and that the question of deception is merely a matter of degree. Further to the above, I also argue that Operation Fortitude teaches us that, at its heart, good strategy seldom depends upon a singular concept but upon several cooperating abstractions. The paper’s final substantive point is that Operation Fortitude reminds us that in order to think productively about strategy, it pays to bear in mind the following military principle: at its most effective, strategy is a unique and exquisitely synergistic coupling of objectives, concepts, and (dehabitualised) tactics.

Neopragmatism and Philosophy of Perception

Neopragmatism is an anti-metaphysical approach to philosophical problems. It addresses such problems by taking the focus off of metaphysics, and turning it onto language. That is, the neopragmatist seeks philosophically uncontentious explanations of the sort of talk that often gives rise to the sense that there is a deep philosophical puzzle to solve. In the domain of perception, reflection on apt ways of describing perceptual experiences have led to various metaphysically committing theories, including (i) sense data theory, (ii) representationalism, and (iii) naïve realism. This chapter uses neopragmatist techniques to undermine the case for the last of these. The attack is two-pronged. First, some of the metaphysical commitments of naïve realism are criticized. Second, neopragmatism is used to explain some of the ideas that were thought to lend naïve realism support. These include the idea that perceptual experience has a peculiar sort of openness or presentational character, and the related idea that such experience gives insight into the mind-independent character of the world. Beyond forming the basis for criticizing other views, neopragmatism also suggests a positive view of perception. This is a form of adverbialism that relies on the idea that our sensory states are information-bearing, but not, in any robust sense, representational.

Parents, participation, partnership: Problematising New Zealand early childhood care and education.

© 2016, © The Author(s) 2016. This article interrogates notions of teacher ‘partnership with parents’ within early childhood care and education settings in the context of Aotearoa (New Zealand). Te Whāriki, the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, clearly positions children’s learning and development as being fostered when their families’ cultures and practices are recognised. Yet findings from both national evaluative reports and recent studies indicate that, in many instances, families that are not members of the dominant cultural group do not experience this synergy. The authors draw on some recent national evaluative reports to paint a broad picture of the implementation of ‘partnership’, and then employ illustrative data from several research projects regarding the inclusion of Māori and Chinese families respectively. The authors apply hybridity theory, along with the related idea of funds of knowledge, to reinforce the need for teachers to proactively move beyond the hegemonic safe zones of traditional teacher-dominated practices towards opening up spaces of dialogic, fluid engagement with families whose backgrounds differ from their own. This aspect of teachers’ professional responsibility is particularly important in the current era of increasing superdiversity.

Parents, participation, partnership: Problematising New Zealand early childhood care and education.

© 2016, © The Author(s) 2016. This article interrogates notions of teacher ‘partnership with parents’ within early childhood care and education settings in the context of Aotearoa (New Zealand). Te Whāriki, the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, clearly positions children’s learning and development as being fostered when their families’ cultures and practices are recognised. Yet findings from both national evaluative reports and recent studies indicate that, in many instances, families that are not members of the dominant cultural group do not experience this synergy. The authors draw on some recent national evaluative reports to paint a broad picture of the implementation of ‘partnership’, and then employ illustrative data from several research projects regarding the inclusion of Māori and Chinese families respectively. The authors apply hybridity theory, along with the related idea of funds of knowledge, to reinforce the need for teachers to proactively move beyond the hegemonic safe zones of traditional teacher-dominated practices towards opening up spaces of dialogic, fluid engagement with families whose backgrounds differ from their own. This aspect of teachers’ professional responsibility is particularly important in the current era of increasing superdiversity.

What We Should Have Learned From Cybersyn

Currently, a major topic is what changes will digitalization and the fourth industrial revolution bring to our society. It is clear that digital transformation of society and the introduction of new technologies will make many jobs obsolete. This process logically leads to the idea of a universal basic income (UBI). In this respect, the socialist project, Cybersyn, is of great interest because it constituted a prototype of a data- and people-related idea to solve this problem. The aim was to increase the country's production, while counteracting rising unemployment through a socialist paradigm, which is obviously pertinent to the development of Industry 4.0. Although Cybersyn can be considered as an early prototype and catalyst, today's exponentially greater computational power has made such systems real, and humans are often excluded from them. Human beings are also positively affected by digital transformation. Herein, the current work contributes to the ethical debate concerning the digital transformation of society.