Transforming the legal profession: an interview study of change managers in law

A lively debate progresses about change to the professions, including law, especially change in the form of managerialism. ‘Managerialism’ covers the methods and beliefs of managers within organisations, used to actively influence, evaluate, and ‘market’ professional work. But what about when that managerialism is change itself? How do we understand managerialism-as-change? This paper reports on an interview study with change managers, or ‘transformation leaders’ in the legal profession. Transformation leaders offer rich insights into the dynamics of professional change because they are incontrovertibly change agents. They are also themselves a form of managerial change as a new cadre of managers within the professions; managers with ‘hybrid’ identities whose legitimacy in professional settings is not assured. The findings presented include: the change leaders’ identities; the types of change being introduced; the constraints on and affordances for change in legal practices; and how change leaders secure, and sometimes struggle to secure, the authority needed to implement change. The concluding discussion highlights the study's contributions to our understanding of professional change and managerialism in the legal context – both what changes are being pursued and how they are materialising through certain ‘managerial’ goals, strategies, and the interactions of those with mixed identities and status.

An Argument for Phonological Stress in French: the syntagm over contrast

It is standardly assumed that French does not have word-stress, rather it has phrase-level prominence. I will advance a number of arguments, many of which have appeared already in the literature, that cumulatively suggest that French roots are characterized by phonological prominence, even if this is non-contrastive. By prominence, I mean a syntagmatically distributed strength that has all the phonological characteristics of stress in other Romance languages. I will remain agnostic about the nature of that stress, eschewing the lively debate about whether French has feet, and if so what type, and at what level. The structure of the argument is as follows. French demonstrably has phonological word-final strength but one wonders what the source of this strength is. Positionally, the initial position is strong and, independently of cases where it is reinforced by other factors, the final position is weak. I will argue, based on parallels with other Romance languages, that French word-final strength derives from root-final phonological stress. The broader significance of this conclusion is that syntagmatic properties are enough to motivate underlying forms, even in the absence of paradigmatic contrasts (minimal pairs).

4-Aminothiophenol Photodimerization Without Plasmons

The photodimerization of 4-aminothiophenol (PATP) into 4,4’-dimercaptobenzene (DMAB) has been extensively utilized as a paradigm reaction to probe the role of surface plasmons in nanoparticle-mediated light-driven processes. Over the past 25 years, a lively debate about the reaction mechanism involved several research groups. Plasmon-mediated generation of energetic (hot) electrons and holes has been invoked as the main driving-force, although plasmonic heating has recently gained attention. However, either model and their combinations are not sufficient to explain some experimental observations and appear, in some cases, contradictory. No matter the differences, there is a general, firm consensus about the presence of plasmonic nanoparticles (Ag or Au), which has always been considered mandatory for triggering the photoconversion. Here I report the first observation of the PATP-to-DMAB photoreaction in the absence of any plasmonic mediators. In particular, neither plasmonic heating nor charge transfer from hot carriers were exploited. The reaction was observed to occur with different kinetics on plasmon-free TiO2 nanoparticles, as well as on self-standing droplets. Confocal microRaman spectroscopy enabled to investigate the reaction progress in different plasmon-free contexts, either aerobic or anaerobic, suggesting a new interpretation of the photodimerization process, based on direct laser-induced activation of singlet oxygen species. These results provide new insights in light-driven redox processes, elucidating the role of sample morphology, light and oxygen.

Humans, machines, and language: A deep alignment in underlying computational styles?

The emergence of AI systems that emulate the remarkable human capacity for language has raised fundamental questions about complex cognition in humans and machines. This lively debate has largely taken place, however, in the absence of specific empirical evidence about how the internal operations of artificial neural networks (ANNs) relate to processes in the human brain as listeners speak and understand language. To directly evaluate these parallels, we extracted multi-level measures of word-by-word sentence interpretation from ANNs, and used Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) to test these against the representational geometries of real-time brain activity for the same sentences heard by human listeners. These uniquely spatiotemporally specific comparisons reveal deep commonalities in the use of multi-dimensional probabilistic constraints to drive incremental interpretation processes in both humans and machines. But at the same time they demonstrate profound differences in the underlying functional architectures that implement this shared algorithmic alignment.

El ciclismo femenino español en la década de 1890: salud, moda, amor y competición = Spanish women's cycling in the 1890s: Health, fashion, love and competition

En la década de 1890, el ciclismo en España experimentó un fuerte auge, sobre todo en hombres, pero también en mujeres. En estos diez años, el ciclismo se desarrolló tanto en la vertiente de ocio como en la competitiva. En ambos casos se generó un enconado debate entre expertos, especialmente médicos, escritores y religiosos, y los propios aficionados al ciclismo, sobre la conveniencia (o no) de que las mujeres montasen en bicicleta. A los argumentos sobre la salud y la vestimenta, que habitualmente han centrado la atención historiográfica sobre el ciclismo femenino, pronto se sumaron aquellos que hacían referencia a la posibilidad de generar espacios de sociabilidad proclives al surgimiento del amor duradero. Un campo aparte fue el ciclismo de competición, que, si bien fue apoyado por los partidarios de la bicicleta, no terminó de cuajar entre la población y no hubo muchas mujeres que se dedicasen profesionalmente a este deporte. AbstractIn the 1890s, Spanish cycling experienced a great boom, especially in men, but also in women. In those years, cycling developed both as leisure and as competition. In both cases, there was a lively debate among experts, particularly physicians, writers and religious authorities, and cycling fans, about whether riding bicycles was a suitable activity for women (physically, psychologically and socially) as well as occurred in a transnational context. Most historians who address women’s cycling have focused on the arguments about health and clothing, but there also existed the question of cycling as a space for development of strong love relationships. Competitive cycling represents a very different case; although it was encouraged by bicycle supporters, it did not take hold among the population; and there were not many women who did this sport professionally. In this article I analyse these aspects through an in-depth study of journalistic sources. Besides, I use the most up-to-date and leading bibliographic contributions of national and international historiography.

Objective, subjective, and accurate reporting of social media use: No evidence that daily social media use correlates with personality traits, motivational states, or well-being

There is a lively debate on the effects of social media use, shaped by self-reported measurements of social media use. However, self-reports have been shown to suffer from low accuracy compared to logged measures of social media use. Even though it is unclear how problematic that measurement error is for our inferences, many scholars call for the exclusive use of ‘objective’ measures. But if measurement error is not systematic, self-reports will still be informative. In contrast, if there is systematic error, associations between social media use and other variables, including well-being, are likely biased. Here, we report an exploratory five day experience sampling study among 96 participants (435 observations) to understand factors that could relate to low accuracy. First, we asked what stable individual differences are related to low accuracy. Second, we explored what daily states relate to accuracy. Third, we explored whether accuracy relates to well-being. Although we did find evidence for a systematic tendency to overestimate social media use, neither individual differences nor daily states were related to that tendency. Accuracy was also unrelated to well-being. Our results suggest that blindly calling for objective measures foregoes a responsibility to understand measurement error in social media use first.

Acculturation or autonomy? Controversy over the status of the Sámi in Finland during the interwar period

The newly independent Finland in the 1920s and 1930s was, in principle, a nation state in which ethnic Finns had an undisputed leading position. Nevertheless, there was a lively debate about the status that would be given to other nationalities in various spheres of social life. The Swedes were the country’s main national minority (accounting for 10 per cent of the total population), and they were granted extensive minority rights. Another locally significant minority were the Sámi who lived in northern Lapland. This paper analyses the extent to which the majority population was willing to meet the wishes of the Sámi. Some Finns were in favour of the Sámi being acculturated as quickly as possible, but a few activists would have liked to grant the Sámi broad autonomy. Several ministries and government agencies investigated the matter thoroughly, but the result was negative for the Sámi.

To the question of nephrosclerosis

As you know, the issue of nephrosclerosis is currently the subject of a lively debate

The Vetting Impasse: The ‘Churches Law’ and Kenya’s Religious Regulation Debate

Over the last decade Kenya has been seeing a lively debate over the regulation of its ever-expanding religious market and demands for a new ‘Churches Law’. Tales of hypocritical abuse of power and of emerging cults coalesced with security concerns regarding religious extremism, leading to the proposal to tighten regulatory control over the religious market, which expanded rapidly since the 1990s. Despite widespread recognition of the problem, new legislative steps have failed so far, notably even leading to a controversial 2014 moratorium on the registration of new religious denominations. This article analyzes this legislative impasse and offers an explanation in terms of the ambivalent yet symbiotic relations between religion and state in Kenya.

Research assessments should recognize responsible research practices — Narrative review of a lively debate and promising developments

Research assessments have been under growing scrutiny in the past few years. The way in which researchers are assessed has a tangible impact on decisions and practices in research. Yet, there is an emerging understanding that research assessments as they currently stand might hamper the quality and the integrity of research. In this chapter, we provide a narrative review of the shortcomings of current research assessments and showcase innovative actions that aim to address these. To discuss these shortcomings and actions, we target five different dimensions of research assessment. First, we discuss the content of research assessment, thereby introducing the common indicators used to assess researchers and the way these indicators are being used. Second, we address the procedure of research assessments, describing the resources needed for assessing researchers in an ever-growing research system. Third, we describe the crucial role of assessors in improving research assessments. Fourth, we present the broader environments in which researchers work, explaining that omnipresent competition and employment insecurity also need to be toned down substantially to foster high quality and high integrity research. Finally, we describe the challenge of coordinating individual actions to ensure that the problems of research assessments are addressed tangibly and sustainably.