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Talk:Radmind

I've created a basic table of contents. I haven't put much thought into it yet. Now is your chance to help co-author a book! If you know anything about radmind, please pitch in! If you need help on using the wiki, check out:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing#Editing_Basics

Also, you can always look at other books and click on edit to see what their source is. If you don't feel like adding links, images, but just write unformated text, that is fine. You can email me at james -at- scl -dot- utah -dot- edu and I will format it, spell correct it, and add it. Just don't ask me to wash your laundry.

Delete?
There is really no content here - I think this should be deleted. As it is today, it mirrors the radmind wikipedia entry. Also, there is much better content on the radmind wiki. My fear is that people will find this and be turned off of Radmind because there is no content. Umeditor 16:01, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

title: Talk:Radmind


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Consciousness Studies/The Description Of Consciousness

''This section presents the empirical idea of consciousness. What consciousness is like before theories are applied to explain it. It is based on descriptions from the Historical Review.''

The definition and description of phenomenal consciousness
What is it like to be conscious? Before embarking on the analysis of phenomenal consciousness it is important to have a definition of what it is that we are attempting to explain. The article below considers empirical descriptions of phenomenal consciousness. It shows that phenomenal consciousness is the space, time and content of our minds (where the content contains intuitions and feelings). As will be seen in later parts of the book not all philosophers and scientists accept that this "phenomenal consciousness" actually exists.

Introduction
Empirical descriptions of phenomenal consciousness have been available in Western literature for centuries and in Eastern literature for millennia. It is often maintained that no-one can define consciousness but there is a large body of literature that gives a clear empirical description of it. Perhaps the claim that no-one can define consciousness is frustration at the fact that no-one can explain consciousness. Weiskrantz (1988) asserted that "Each of us will have his or her own idea of what, if anything, is meant by consciousness..." and that insisting upon a precise definition would be a mistake. Koch and Crick (1999) stated that "Consciousness is a vague term with many usages and will, in the fullness of time, be replaced by a vocabulary that more accurately reflects the contribution of different brain processes."

But is consciousness really a "vague term" and should we each have our own idea of what it means? The empirical descriptions of Descartes, Kant and others are summarised below under the headings of space, time, qualia and awareness. These descriptions show that consciousness is not a vague term at all.

Space and Time
Kant (1781) argued that our minds must be capable of representing objects in space and time. Experiences presuppose space and time as pure concepts of reason. Without space, objects could not be differentiated and would have no properties. Without representation in time, the concepts of succession of events and simultaneity would be unknown to us. James(1904) also describes experience as extended in space and says that the idea that "inner experience is absolutely inextensive seems to me little short of absurd". Descartes (1641, Meditation V, 3) was also clear that imaginings and perceptions are experiences where things are arranged in space and time: "In the first place, I distinctly imagine that quantity which the philosophers commonly call continuous, or the extension in length, breadth, and depth that is in this quantity, or rather in the object to which it is attributed. Further, I can enumerate in it many diverse parts, and attribute to each of these all sorts of sizes, figures, situations, and local motions; and, in time, I can assign to each of these motions all degrees of duration." Descartes was, as was so often the case, well ahead of his time by describing continuity and dimensionality, the factors that define his view of space as an actual vector space accessible to mathematical and physical analysis (See section on Descartes for a full discussion.)

Gregory (1966) also pointed out that we see things as if they are projected into space around us. The idea of projection was implicit in Kant’s and Descartes’ descriptions, which are from the viewpoint of an observer looking out at contents of experience, but Gregory is explicit (although he believes that explanations based on the projection are absurd).

Kant and Descartes describe consciousness as something extended in time but it is Clay and James who draw this fully to our attention. James (1890) quotes E.R. Clay who coined the term "specious present" to describe how we exist for more than a durationless instant and then goes on to say: "In short, the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were--a rearward--and a forward-looking end. It is only [p. 610] as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it." Notice how James’ observer is at an instant but the mind is stretched over time.

James’ mental time is probably not the same as physical time. Hermann Weyl, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, wrote that reality is a "four-dimensional continuum which is neither 'time' nor 'space.' Only the consciousness that passes on in one portion of this world experiences the detached piece which comes to meet it and passes behind it, as history, that is, as a process that is going forward in time and takes place in space" (Weyl 1918). In other words consciousness has a way of containing events in the same order as they occur in the world but seems to use a mental time that is different from physical time.

Qualia
Qualia are types of things that occur in conscious experience. The colour purple is a good example of a quale (Tye, 1997). Hume (1739) pointed out of things in the mind that "[t]here is nothing but the idea of their colour or tangibility, which can render them conceivable by the mind;" in other words, qualia might be things in the mind rather than attributes. Qualia appear to be exceptional and inexplicable: Churchland (1988) writes "How on earth can a feeling of pain result from ions passing across a membrane?" Descartes (Meditations VI, 6, 1641) clearly describes qualia.

Awareness
Descartes, Locke, Hume, Reid and Kant describe conscious phenomena as if there is an observer in their mind looking out at qualia or feeling qualia in the space and time around about. Descartes and Kant thought that the mind must also contain a conceptualisation or intuition of the meaning of its space, time and content so that the qualia become grouped into objects, the objects into events and the events into meaning and expectation.

As Kant put it, we have "intuitions" about the relations between things. In modern parlance our conscious experience appears to contain the output from an unconscious processor; although Kant's term, "intuition," is a more scientific approach because it is an observation without assumptions about causes. If the present is extended in time, or a "specious" present as Clay put it, then many moments are available through which it is possible to apprehend both a question and its answer: the processor can frame the question and provide the answer. The observation that our minds extend through time means that this processor does not need to be recursive to provide the outputs we experience as intuitions (one moment can contain an intuition about another whilst both are in the mind). Descartes (Meditations VI, 10, 1641) considered the origin of intuitions: "Further, I cannot doubt but that there is in me a certain passive faculty of perception, that is, of receiving and taking knowledge of the ideas of sensible things; but this would be useless to me, if there did not also exist in me, or in some other thing, another active faculty capable of forming and producing those ideas. But this active faculty cannot be in me [in as far as I am but a thinking thing], seeing that it does not presuppose thought, and also that those ideas are frequently produced in my mind without my contributing to it in any way, and even frequently contrary to my will." Descartes suspected that the ideas were formed unconsciously, probably in the brain.

Types of Consciousness
It is sometimes held that there are many types of consciousness, Antony (2001) lists: phenomenal consciousness, access consciousness, state consciousness, creature consciousness, introspective consciousness and self-consciousness. Antony takes the view that these are all 'modulations' of the term consciousness and do not mean that there are in fact different types of consciousness. In other words these 'types of consciousness' are modulations of the intuition of content arranged in space and time that is the singular consciousness described by Kant and Descartes. According to this explanation access consciousness is the time extended form of processes in phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness is the time extended form of bodily processes and inner speech etc.. As an example, if we say a word then think it soundlessly it is evident that inner speech is whole, time extended words coming from the vague direction of the vocal chords (or both ears), when we move a limb much of the whole movement is present in our experience as a set of displacements at the position of the limb and extended through time.

The nature of consciousness as described above, i.e. phenomenal or subjective consciousness, must be distinguished from the type of consciousness used in Medical clinical states. Clinical consciousness is determined partly by the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) in the brain stem extending into higher anatomic levels of the brain including the cortex. Alerting or arousal is the function of the ARAS and is the doorway to awareness. Failure of this system or its components results in clinical states ranging from a temporary loss of consciousness as noted in head injuries (concussion) all the way to complete coma. The comatose state includes failure of eye opening to stimulation, a motor response more than just simple reflex withdrawal movements and lack of verbalization. Coma can be produced by structural lesions of the brain, metabolic and nutritional disorders, exogenous toxins, central nervous system infections, seizures, temperature-related extremes (e.g. hypothermia or hyperthermia) and most commonly trauma. Included in this extreme are such entities as persistent vegetative state and the minimally conscious state. The gamut ranges through stupor, prolonged concussion, and transient concussion. This use of the term ‘consciousness’ is not the nature of ‘consciousness’ as used in this article and must be distinguished as such.

Observations and Denials
There can be little doubt that most descriptions of conscious phenomenology have described the same things although some have used terms such as 'continuity' for time and 'representation' for space. Our conscious experiences are the experience of being an observer that has qualia distributed in space and time around a point. This experience is imbued with intuitions.

Contrary to the views of Weiskrantz and of Koch and Crick there seems to be no need to await a definition of consciousness. It has been described for centuries. So why did these authors feel a need to suspend any definition?

The answer is that over the years there has been no widely accepted theory of how this empirical consciousness could occur. This led certain philosophers such as Ryle (1949) to question whether the description of consciousness was credible.

In most cases this sceptical analysis begins with an explanatory discussion of consciousness such as: if information travels from the observation to the observer then the observer contains the information so there must be another observer within to observe this second set of information. In this case the conclusion is that this implies an impossible homunculus or Ryle’s "ghost in the machine" so observation and observer’s cannot occur in the mind. This is an interesting argument but it can also be framed to give exactly the opposite result. The scientific form of the argument would be: the observed form of conscious experience cannot occur if it relies on information transfer, therefore the hypothesis that information transfer is all that is required to explain consciousness is wrong and some other explanation is needed. (This means that although the content of consciousness is derived from the senses via signals in neurones, conscious experience is not these signals flowing into a nexus). In science the observation is paramount and cannot be discarded because it conflicts with theory.

The process of discounting an observation when an explanation fails also applies to other aspects of consciousness studies. As Gregory (1988) put it: " 'If you can’t explain it – deny it' is one strategy for dealing with embarrassing questions such as 'what is consciousness?' ". If we discount these denials then the empirical observations of Kant and Descartes and the other empiricists are the bedrock of consciousness studies and consciousness can indeed be described as an observation containing the space, time and content of our minds (where the content contains intuitions and feelings).

This simple definition of the experience we call consciousness is internally consistent and can be expressed in mathematical language. Phenomenal consciousness is a multidimensional manifold with vectors pointing towards the centre (the apparent observation point). The content can be both the input and output of processors that are external to the manifold.

Adapted from the article The description and definition of consciousness by Alex Green in Science and Consciousness Review (with permission of the author).

A non-mathematical description of consciousness is: a collection of events arranged in time and space that form directed elements that all point at the same place and instant.

The viewing point and the observer
Green's summary of phenomenal consciousness deserves further elaboration and description. Science begins with empirical descriptions. To experience phenomenal consciousness simply lean back with your eyes open and listen. Phenomenal consciousness is the observational space and time that is occurring and the simultaneous things within it that point at the apparent viewing point. It includes bodily sensations, inner speech and the smell on and around things etc. Phenomenal consciousness is experience itself. If the experience is a lucid dream it may contain a fantastical image, if it is a perception it may contain information about something in the world beyond the body. Experience is not usually an experience of the content of experience, experience is already there, arranged in space and time (see note below).

The illustrations show the difference between an actual 3D part of the world, 2D representations of that part of the world, conscious experience itself and naive realism.

It is well known that a 3D object cannot be shown on a 2D surface. Its form is specified as sets of coordinates.

Most visual experiences are arranged as views. Views are represented on paper using perspective drawings. Pictures that use perspective are scaled images of the world as it would appear on the retina of one eye.

In experience itself things are arranged as things directed at a point (vectors). Nothing flows into the point. Experience is a manifold of events that are loosely based on data from the retinas and other sense organs. It has contents like the drawing on paper but instead of being a collection of ink particles confined to 2D it is a set of vectors directed at a point.

Experience also involves things arranged in time. Things can be simultaneous and there is continuity. Arrangements in time are independent of arrangements in space. The phonemes of a word do not overlap each other and the stages of a movement do not create a smear. These independent arrangements in time are akin to the way that things that are arranged left and right do not overlap things that are arranged up and down. Left and right are independent of up and down. In a similar way, time seems to be an independent direction for arranging things.

Our experience differs from naive realism. In naive realism experience is believed to be an impossible physical meeting of light rays at a single point in the eye that through some unspecified mechanism project back to their source. Naive realism is a primitive dynamical interpretation of experience, an attempt to explain an empirical geometrical form in terms of flows of matter. In contrast, in experience there seems to be a set of vectors directed at a point.

An intriguing feature of the empirical form of experience is that things seem to be separated by angular separations. This allows objects of any size to be represented and explains how a page of text on our laps and the dome of a planetarium can be encompassed in the same form.

The apparent viewing point has caused considerable difficulty for many empiricist philosophers (although the British Empiricists tended to avoid it). When philosophers have stopped describing conscious experience and tried to explain the viewing point they have often resorted to the supernatural: Descartes, Malebranche and Reid all explained the viewing point in terms of a supernatural soul at a point that does the seeing or experiencing. But none of the empiricists describe anything flowing into the viewing point; indeed nothing does flow or could flow into and through a point. The empirical truth is that the viewing point is a geometrical phenomenon, not the recipient of some simultaneous flow of everything in experience. Just look, your viewing point is where everything in experience is directed but things are not pouring into it and it, itself, is a point, it cannot and does not contain anything. This seems to be Aristotle's insight when he wrote "In every case the mind which is actively thinking is the objects which it thinks."

The field of vectors that are the content of consciousness are also difficult to interpret; some philosophers believe that they are in the brain and form a representation of the world whilst others believe that they are directly attached to things in the world beyond the body.

The empirical description of consciousness allows us to make a sharp distinction between the scientific activities of measurement and observation. Measurement is the change in state of a measuring instrument in response to an event in the environment. Observation is the occurrence of events in the geometrical manifold that we call our conscious experience.

This section has used the descriptions provided by generations of philosophers to characterise the phenomenon of consciousness. Many modern philosophers assume that readers are familiar with these empirical descriptions and use "what it is like to be conscious" as a shorthand for these empirical reports. From the seventeenth century onwards it was realised that these descriptions are difficult to explain using Newtonian physics or elementary information theory.

* Note: the term "experience of" should be reserved for things that act as a source of the content of experience, such as the QM fields that constitute the things that are sensed. We have an "experience of" a flower when signals from the flower are composed into the form of a flower in our experience. Sometimes there is an "experience of" the content of consciousness, for instance when intuitions about the content occur. See later modules for a discussion.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Template:Botm Winner Short

Book of the Month

title: Template:Botm Winner Short


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Talk:Home Remedies

The chapters and alphabetical listings already seem to be causing confusion on this wikibook. A restructuring would probably be beneficial. Worth looking at the Cookbook to use as a model for this Home Remedies wikibook? It would be good to have the remedies cross-linked by substance (cf. ingredient), method (cf. cooking technique), ailment (cf. meal type). Some general 'overview' writeups on the uses of e.g. cloves/ginger/garlic/lemon juice might work well.

title: Talk:Home Remedies


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Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Advanced Tutorials/Python Scripting/Scripts for modifying meshes

(To be written.)

See saltshaker a basic but functional Python script for Blender. The page includes details of how it was made.

http://jmsoler.free.fr/didacticiel/blender/tutor/python_script01_en.htm is a good website for learning about mesh creation.


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Visual Basic/Glossary

An alphabetical list of definitions crossreferenced to more thorough explanations in the main text or in external documents.

A

 * argument : In computing jargon an argument is one of the pieces of data passed to a procedure. Another name is parameter.
 * assign, assigning, assignment: Assignment is one of the fundamental operations of computing. All it means is copying a value into the memory location pointed at by a variable.  The value can be a literal or the value of some other variable, q.v. Assignment

B

 * ByRef : Declares an argument to a procedure as a pointer to the argument instead of as a copy of the value of the argument. This allows the procedure to permanently change the variable.  If neither ByRef or ByVal is stated, ByRef is assumed by the compiler.
 * ByVal : Declares an argument to a procedure as a copy of the value of the argument. The value of the original variable cannot be changed by the procedure.  The value of the newly created variable can be changed within the procedure, but this does not affect the variable it was copied from.  Programs are more robust if variables are declared ByVal whenever possible since this means that an argument will not be unexpectedly changed by calling a function.  This also results in a faster program (see pg 758 of the Microsoft Visual Basic 6 Programmer's Guide).

C

 * compiler directives : These are instructions included in the text of the program that affect the way the compiler behaves. For instance it might be directed to include one or another version of a piece of code depending on whether the target operating system is Windows 95 or Windows XP.

I

 * Immediate Windows: This is the window in the IDE which receives output from Debug.Print. See ../IDE/

J

 * JavaScript: JavaScript is an interpreted language mostly used to provide scripts inside web pages. It is, however, not confined to such uses.  See Jarithmetic, a case study in multilingual programming and Crockford on JavaScript, the world's most misunderstood language.
 * JScript : Microsoft's implementation of JavaScript as provided by the Windows Script Host. See Jarithmetic for an example of its use.

O

 * Operands and Operators: An operand is operated on by an operator. Expressions are built of operands and operators.  For instance in this expression:

a = b + c

there are three operands (a, b, and c) and two operators (= and +).

Operands in Visual Basic Classic are either variables or literals

P

 * procedure : A subroutine, function, method, or property

R

 * ragged array : An array having rows of differing lengths. Such arrays are natural in languages such as C and JavaScript but rather unusual in Visual Basic although there is nothing that prevents their creation.  In Visual Basic you can create such an array using the Array function:

 * Such arrays are inefficient in Visual Basic because they are implemented as Variants but functionally identical arrays can be created as instances of a class and can be made much more efficient both in storage space and execution time, although not quite as efficient as C arrays.

 * real number : A variable that can hold a real number is one that can hold a number that can have any value including fractional value. In computer languages variables only approximate real numbers because the irrational numbers are also real, see Real number.  In Visual Basic Classic there are two real number types: Single and Double, see ../Data Types/

 * reference: A variable that holds a pointer to a value rather than holding the value itself. In strict Visual Basic usage only object references work like this.

 * reference argument : A declaration of an argument using the ByRef keyword. Reference arguments allow the subroutine or function to make changes to the variable in the calling routine.  See ../Procedures and Functions/.

S

 * subroutine : A procedure similar to a function but it does not return a value.

title: Visual Basic/Glossary


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User:Dedalus

Commons - Meta - WikiWoordenboek -

SourceNL - Wikiquote - WikinewsNL - Wikispecies Dutch Wikimedia Foundation - Dedalus w:de - w:en - w:fr - w:fy - w:li - w:nds - w:nl de:Benutzer:Dedalus

fr:Utilisateur:Dedalus fy:Meidogger:Dedalus li:Gebroeker:Dedalus nds:Bruker:Dedalus nl:Gebruiker:Dedalus

title: User:Dedalus


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A-level Physics/Electrons, Waves and Photons/Quantum physics

Quantum physics tries to explain the properties of matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels. We use quantum physics to model behaviour and properties of microscopic objects that cannot be modelled by Einsteinian physics, which is the physics used for objects at the macroscopic level (as viewed with the naked eye).

Does light behave as a wave or as particles?
Interference experiments, such as Young's Slits (see below) can only be explained if we assume light is a wave. However, the photoelectric effect can only be explained if light is a particle. So what is light - particle or wave?

The best thing to remember is that both waves and particles are nothing more than physical models for explaining our observations. For example, someone might think of counting apples when they are learning basic arithmetic; this does not mean that numbers are apples, only that we can think of them as such in certain specific circumstances. When we get to the concept of negative numbers, using apples as a model breaks down unsurprisingly. Similarly, in quantum physics, we find that we must use different models for different situations.

Young's Slits
Thomas Young conducted a famous experiment in which light was diffracted by a double slit and produced an interference pattern on a screen. An interference pattern is a pattern of bright and dark bands caused by the constructive and destructive interference of the rays from the two slits, and is only a feature of waves. Electrons are usually considered to be particles, but produce apparent interference patterns by diffracting. To produce an interference pattern, you must have a wavelength. This gives more evidence of Wave-particle duality.

The Photoelectric Effect
In analysing the photoelectric effect quantitatively using Einstein's method, the following equivalent equations are used:

Energy of photon = Energy needed to remove an electron + Kinetic energy of the emitted electron

Algebraically:
 * $$hf = \phi + E_{k_{max}} \,$$

where
 * h is Planck's constant,
 * f is the frequency of the incident photon,
 * $$\phi = h f_0 \ $$ is the work function, or minimum energy required to remove an electron from atomic binding,
 * f0 is the threshold frequency for the photoelectric effect to occur,
 * $$E_{k_{max}} = \frac{1}{2} m v_m^2 $$ is the maximum kinetic energy of ejected electrons,
 * m is the rest mass of the ejected electron, and
 * $$ v_m $$ is the velocity of the ejected electron.

Note: If the photon's energy (hf) is less than the work function ($$\phi$$), no electron will be emitted. The work function is sometimes denoted $$W$$. Light is made of photons in which they are equal to hf. Electrons near a metal surface would absorb one photon hence its energy would be transmitted to the electron If the photon's energy is equal to or greater than the metal surface's work function, the electron would be able to escape the surface.

Planck constant
The physicist Max Planck studied a phenomenon known as black-body radiation, and found that the transmission of light was best treated as packets of energy called photons. The energy of a photon, $$E$$, is given by the following formula:

$$E=h\,f$$

where $$E$$ is the energy of the photon, $$h$$ is the Planck constant, $$6.63 \times 10^{-34}$$, and $$f$$ is the frequency of the light. Since the velocity of light (which is c in a vacuum) is given by $$f\lambda$$, it may be helpful to use the equation

$$E=\frac{hc}{\lambda}$$

if you are given the wavelength of light and not the frequency.

The Photon Model
Over the ages, scientists have argued what light actually is. Newton argued that light is composed of particles called corpuscles and theorised that diffraction was due to the particles speeding up as they entered a denser medium, being attracted by gravity. However he has since been proved wrong, now we can measure the speed of light and have proved it to slow down in a denser medium. Albert Einstein thought that light were discrete packets of energy which he called quanta.

Wave-particle duality
In 1924, Louis-Victor de Broglie formulated the de Broglie hypothesis, claiming that all matter has a wave-like nature; he related wavelength, λ (lambda), and momentum, p:

 * $$\lambda = \frac{h}{p}$$

This is a generalization of Einstein's equation above since the momentum of a photon is given by p = E / c where c is the speed of light in a vacuum, and λ = c / ν.

De Broglie's formula was confirmed three years later for electrons (which have a rest-mass) with the observation of electron diffraction in two independent experiments. At the University of Aberdeen, George Paget Thomson passed a beam of electrons through a thin metal film and observed the predicted interference patterns. At Bell Labs Clinton Joseph Davisson and Lester Halbert Germer guided their beam through a crystalline grid.


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New Zealand Economics

This book will encompass theoretical and practical economic developments with respect to a New Zealand context. New Zealand has typically followed orthodox global trends in economics, but has at times diverged from the prevailing economic orthodoxy, leading to its reputation as a "social laboratory of the world". Seddon's Liberal-Labour social and humanitarian reforms of the 1890s, and the introduction of a state welfare system by the First Labour Government, attracted international attention and commentary. More recently, the neoliberal economic 'revolution' of 1984-1993, some of the most rapid and wide-ranging economic 'structural adjustments' the world has seen, has led to massive social, political, and economic changes, and debate still continues as whether the 'pain' was worth the 'gain'.

Initially this book will only focus on the monetarist/neoliberal, Keynesian, and Marxist interpretations of the pivotal economic changes between 1945-1973, and 1973 to the present. As time permits, I shall add other chapters relevant to the economics of 'the Land of the Long White Cloud'. I enthusiastically welcome contributions and editing to this book - "If you have knowledge, let others light their candle by it." - Margaret Fuller

Interpretations of New Zealand's Post-War Economic History
New Zealand’s economic fortunes were drastically altered with the onset of the global recession in the mid-1970s, and two stages are clearly discernible. Prior to 1973 the ‘long boom’ was characterised by strong growth, a balance of payments equilibrium (owing to historically auspicious terms of trade), low inflation, rising real wages, and full employment. From 1974 to 2005 New Zealand had problems with ‘stagflation’ (stagnated growth and high inflation), declining profitability, declining real wages, and massively increased levels of unemployment and impoverishment. This chapter will outline the differences in Marxist, Keynesian and monetarist interpretations of the two epochs in New Zealand (NZ) economic history, and will explain why understanding the interpretations is relevant and necessary to appreciating politics and policy-generation in NZ since the mid-1970s.

NZ was not isolated in its economic downturn. Globally, economies were cooling and unemployment was mounting, with the G7 group of countries, between 1950 and 1973, experiencing a drastic drop in growth (5.5 percent to 2.1 percent) and unemployed numbers up to 6.2 percent from 2.1 percent. However, NZ had peculiarities that exacerbated the global trend. Very few countries experienced both the effects of the oil shocks and a persistently deteriorating market for major traditional exports. NZ’s reliance on a narrow range of exports whilst simultaneously being dependent on imports of oil, capital and intermediate inputs left it vulnerable to the whim of international fortunes. Major demand- and supply-side constraints to agricultural growth also left it susceptible to a decline in terms of trade. Nonetheless, comparative evidence strongly suggests that regardless of the terms of trade decline, growth rates would still have declined, since NZ shares similar predispositions of development as other advanced capitalist economies since 1945.

Whilst monetarists and Keynesians both broadly agree on the heavy impact and effect of the externals shocks of the 1970s and 80s on the NZ economy, they, and their Marxist counterparts, interpret NZ’s economic history through fundamentally distinctive and conflicting approaches. Areas of contention include the role of state in economic management; the basis of the boom and ensuing collapse; the stability and meaning behind the economic recovery of the last decade; and how the shifting economic environment has affected policy, policy-making, and the state.

Monetarism/Neoliberalism
Monetarism and neoliberalism are arguably the most important and widespread of modern economic theories. The central assumption of monetarism/neoliberalism is that the smoothly functioning and self-adjusting market economy, unhindered by government, will spontaneously achieve equilibrium with full employment of resources. With Treasury’s faith in the market’s invisible hand, the utterly rational actions of homo economicus, and a tight grasp of the reins of the money supply, they proposed to make New Zealand a lean, mean, wealth-generating machine.

Many of the economic reforms of the 1980s were of a monetarist/neoliberal nature, centred on the belief that New Zealand's bloated economy was holding the country back. Modern proponents assert that the country's contemporary economic growth is resultant of the hard-fought reforms of the 1980s, and that further, as-yet-unrealised benefits will be the result of this period.

Keynesianism
The central tenets of Keynesian economic thought are the rejection of the neoliberal assumption that market economies are self-regulating and market clearing, and the elevated significance of aggregated demand. Keynes himself put it best, stating, “The system is not self-adjusting and, without purposive direction, it is incapable of translating our actual poverty into potential plenty”. Keynesians refute the assertion that the economic decline of the 1960s and 1970s were a result of Keynesian economic theory, but of poor economic leadership (particularly prime minister Robert Muldoon's 'Think Big' project).

Modern Keynesian supporters claim that the period of stagnation and recession in the 1980s were avoidable and unneccessary. Keynesian adherents believe that as long as the neoliberalism prevails as the orthodox mechanism driving policy, the NZ economy will continue to trail behind the OECD average.

Marxist Interpretation
The key difference between Marxism and the two previously discussed approaches is that whilst monetarism and Keynesianism diverge over how the economy should be managed, Marxian economic thought considers the independent variables to be endogenous to the economy. Consequently, capitalism’s intrinsic tendency to generate crisis, characterised by growing unemployment and economic stagnation, will render state policy ineffective, regardless of which is chosen. From a Marxist perspective, therefore, exogenous shocks or government action were not considered to be the cause of the post-1973 economic deceleration.

The Marxian law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is central to this understanding, and the same features responsible for the increase in the general rate of profit were responsible for undermining the long-term rate of profit: the process was internally contradictory. Due to the structural nature of capitalism contemporary Marxists claim that the New Zealand economy will tend towards crises once again.

Importance of Understanding These Interpretations
It is necessary to understand NZ’s changing economic landscape and its interpretations: not only do they shape our life chances, choices, and experiences, they influence politics and policy-making profoundly. Without an understanding of the collapse, without an empirically-supported interpretation of the resulting economic changes, we are doomed to repeat mistakes made by those before us. Changes in the economic landscape of New Zealand have had colossal effects, and an understanding of these changes - and the theoretical interpretations of them - are integral to understanding a diverse and expansive range of issues relevant to every person – today, and in the future. If we do not continue to analyse and understand what has led our world to be the way it is, future generations may themselves be condemned to repeat our mistakes.

title: New Zealand Economics


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Biblical Studies/Christianity/Famous works of fiction

 * Dante’s Inferno, a book where a man travels through hell and described his experience.

 * /Chronicles of Narnia/ by C.S. Lewis
 * C(live) S(taples) Lewis (1898-1963) − British author, literary scholar, and Christian apologist. He wrote more than 40 books, the best-known being, /The Screwtape Letters/ (1942). This satire is a masterpiece of diabolical wit and moral wisdom involving a correspondence between two devils, Screwtape, one of the upper echelon in Satan's "Lowerachy," and his nephew, "Dear Wormwood," a junior devil with an earthly mission, wherein the human "patient" is under close scrutiny. The Allegory of Love (1936), his major critical work, is a study of love in medieval literature. Mere Christianity, an expanded series of 1943 BBC radio chats, is most admired and influential across a wide spectrum of Christians, which may attest to the author's success in accomplishing the aim of restating theology in a way that avoids many controversies. He also wrote a well-known science-fiction trilogy and the Narnia fantasies for children.

C.S. Lewis Foundation http://www.cslewis.org/ Into the Wardrobe http://cslewis.drzeus.net/news/ excellent home page quote for the day. ---

Lewis' greatest books may be
 * 1)  A little volume called The Great Divorce—a fantasy re Heaven and Hell
 * 2)  Till We Have Faces, his last (and probably best) book, and adaptation of the Greek myth, Cupid and Psyche.  Here Lewis shows just how far he has grown in spiritual wisdom.

 * /Pilgrim's Progress/ by John Bunyan


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Internet Technologies/Web hosting

Web Hosting: An Introduction

What is Web Hosting?
When someone sets up a server and hooks it up to the Internet, the files on the server become accessible over the Internet. Web Hosting is the space on a Web server where you can upload files. If you upload HTML files, you'll have a Web site. If you upload .ZIP files, you'll have a download area. There are a lot of organizations that provide Web hosting.

What does Web Hosting do?
Most companies own their own servers these days, but some still pay for Web hosting. Let's say John Doe decides he wants to sell his paintings online. He purchases Web hosting, and sets up a Web site. Jane Doe, on the other hand, wants to set up a forum system. She purchases Web hosting and installs the forums. If you know how, you can make an entire Web site, or put any files you want, online, via your Web hosting.

In addition, over the last few years hundreds of "Web site softwares" have been written that, when installed onto your hosting account, give you an immediate Web site.

When looking for a Web site software, it's important to consider the software license. If you chose to use free software, you will have the advantage of new software releases that are made available free of charge. Commercial, albeit more powerful, alternatives are often available.

How and Where can I get hosting?
Web hosting is available in two forms — paid and free.

Paid Web hosting has a periodic fee, be it monthly, quarterly or annually, and typically provides considerable amounts of storage space for your files. Depending on the service, one may get additional support for server-side scripts, Web commerce support, visitor traffic reports, and so on. If the hosting service has high-speed connections to the Internet and fast server equipment, it may be able to provide access for many thousands of visitors and allow downloading of tens of gigabytes of files, and more, per day. Technical support is usually available around the clock, by telephone, Web chat or email, allowing the subscriber to resolve most problems in a few minutes, or, at most, in several hours.

Free hosting, on the other hand, typically has severely limited file storage space and low bandwidth provisions. It may be run on equipment that is just as capable as that used by paid hosting services, but it is usually an adjunct to some other business being carried out by the provider. Your Web pages will be presented to the site visitor along with advertising banners or pop-up advertisements as a way of recovering the cost of providing this free service to you. Support for server-side scripts may be limited or non-existent, as well as access to many of the basic functions that most Web hosting programs are capable of providing. Technical support is usually limited, usually by email only, with response times figured in days. If you are a novice, a free service may be the place to start, as they often provide semi-automated site-building templates and online tutorials.

With the recent drop in monthly fees for Web hosting — usually in the range of a few dollars a month for a basic plan — it is recommended that one subscribe to decent, commercial hosting service.

Free hosting sites are over-subscribed and would be good for those who do not mind waiting for periods of time for support resolution.

Reseller vs. Shared
Reseller accounts allow clients to divide their account and sell or distribute these allocations to other users. For example, if John purchases a 10GB reseller account, he can then sell ten 1GB accounts. Shared hosting refers to the fact that there are usually 100+ people per server — in effect, "sharing" the server.

Types of hosting control panels
There are multiple types of hosting control panels available on the market. Each one is specifically designed for a particular operating system and type of web hosting. For example, some control panels are specific to Linux and others are specific to Windows. Some hosting control panels are designed for hosting resellers, while others are designed for shared web hosting or dedicated server hosting.

The most popular hosting control panels

DotNetPanel - Windows hosting control panel for creating, managing, and selling shared web hosting accounts, dedicated servers, virtual private servers, Exchange hosting, SharePoint hosting, Dynamics CRM hosting, and BlackBerry hosting.

cPanel - Linux hosting control panel by cPanel Inc. The company develops two control panels: 1) cPanel for end users and 2) Web Host Manager (WHM) for managing a dedicated server including creating and managing shared web hosting accounts and reseller hosting accounts. cPanel Inc. is working on a Windows hosting control panel platform.

Plesk - Windows and Linux hosting control panel. Integrated with a billing system and provides functionality to create, manage, and sell shared web hosting and reseller web hosting accounts.

DirectAdmin - Linux hosting control panel for creating, managing, and selling shared web hosting and reseller web hosting accounts.

Ensim - Linux and Windows hosting control panel for infrastructure management software enabling; access control, identity management, change audit & reporting, and automated provisioning for enterprises and service providers. Ensim Unify offers an integrated suite of tools for Active Directory, Exchange, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Google Apps, SharePoint, SQL, Office Communications Server (OCS), and Web Hosting – providing an automated, secure, compliant management environment that overlays existing infrastructure.

Interworx - The Interworx dedicated server hosting control panels include: 1) NodeWorx for system administrators and 2) SiteWorx for website administrators. Interworx runs on Linux dedicated servers and Linux virtual private servers.

Hosting Controller - Hosting Controller is a web hosting automation control panel designed for web hosting companies that offer services in a cluster environment. Web hosting companies can manage Windows and Linux servers through a centralized interface. Web hosting companies can diversify their hosting offerings by adding multiple mail servers within a cluster and offering MS-Exchange & SharePoint hosting.

Helm - Parallels Helm is a Microsoft windows control panel solution, empowering hosting providers to control, automate and sell products and services.

H-Sphere - Parallels H-Sphere delivers a multi-server hosting automation solution for Linux, BSD, and Windows platforms. H-Sphere includes its own controls panels, automated billing, and provisioning solution in a single integrated system. H-Sphere is scalable to any number of boxes. Web, mail, database, and Windows hosting servers can be added without downtime.[1]

[1] Source of information: http://www.daveonwebhosting.com/web-hosting-control-panels/types-of-hosting-control-panels/

title: Internet Technologies/Web hosting


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Radiation Oncology/NSCLC

Non-small cell lung cancer

 * Official Guidelines
 * Staging
 * Overview
 * Anatomy
 * Screening
 * Early Stage Operable (Surgery first)
 * Early Stage Inoperable
 * Locally Advanced Resectable (Neoadjuvant first)
 * Locally Advanced Unresectable
 * Special Situations (Pancoast, etc.)
 * Recurrent
 * Palliation
 * Lung Brachytherapy
 * Prophylactic Cranial Irradiation
 * Miscellaneous Drugs
 * Large Cell Neuroendocrine Carcinoma
 * Proton Therapy
 * NTCP and Toxicity
 * RTOG Lung protocols
 * Randomized (Level I) Evidence

In the process of moving from old page.

title: Radiation Oncology/NSCLC


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Radiation Oncology/SCLC

Small cell lung cancer

 * Overview
 * Anatomy
 * Limited Stage
 * Extensive Stage
 * Prophylactic Cranial Irradiation (PCI)
 * Brain Metastases
 * RTOG SCLC Lung protocols
 * Randomized Evidence
 * Review

title: Radiation Oncology/SCLC


text:
New Zealand Economics/Monetarism-Neoliberalism

Introduction
''“Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”'' - Milton Friedman

Monetarism and neoliberalism confidently strut side-by-side through the schools of modern economic thought: the prevailing economic paradigm, the ‘way of the future’ – or so Treasury would have you believe. The central assumption of monetarism/neoliberalism is that the smoothly functioning and self-adjusting market economy, unhindered by government, will spontaneously achieve equilibrium with full employment of resources. With Treasury’s faith in the market’s invisible hand, the utterly rational actions of homo economicus, and a tight grasp of the reins of the money supply, they proposed to make New Zealand (NZ) a lean, mean, wealth-generating machine.

Monetarist/Neoliberal Interpretation: 1945-1973
Treasury was blunt in its 1984 and 1987 briefing papers to the Fourth Labour Government: “The New Zealand economy continues to display one of the most lacklustre performances among countries in the developed world”. Whilst it acknowledges the impact of the decline in terms of trade and the global downturn in economic performance on NZ’s economic growth (“When world prices move against us, there is an unavoidable loss of income”), Treasury clearly lays the blame at the feet of the Muldoon administration (1975 – 1984). The National Government’s management of the economy, its Keynesian-style policies, and its “unwillingness to adjust to changing external conditions” explained rising unemployment, NZ’s comparative economic deterioration, and soaring inflation.

The monetarist argument for the end of NZ’s economic “golden weather” was simple and clear: economies are assumed to tend to equilibrium and maximise resource utilisation, therefore the state must have interfered in the market’s distribution of resources. Expansionary monetary and fiscal policy, anathema to monetarists, had generated excessive inflationary pressures, undermining growth, distorting market signals, and reducing the competitiveness of NZ producers by raising (relative to trading partners) their cost structures. These problems were compounded by the pegged nominal exchange rate’s inability to adjust to ease the mounting current account deficit. The National government’s interventionism was ad hoc and inconsistent, rife with excessive regulation, and structural disincentives to excel. Furthermore, misallocation of resources within an overprotected economy, and an inflexible and rigid labour market, increased economic susceptibility to both the exogenous supply shocks of the 1973 and 1979 oil crises, and the collapse of prices for agricultural exports.

Thus, Treasury’s prescription was for the Fourth Labour Government to reject Keynesianism, and to adopt a strong monetarist economic policy framework, with minimal government intervention and emancipation of the market. Integral to the underpinning neoclassical foundation of Treasury’s counsel was the reduction and maintenance of inflation at a diminutive level (initially legislated at 0-2%, currently 1-3%) in order to enable price flexibility, unambiguous market signals, and ultimately, spontaneous economic growth, balance of payments equilibrium and maximised unemployment. This was strongly supported by the Reserve Bank, who argued that “the control of inflation was among the most important changes required for faster economic growth”. Other remedies for the economy included reform of the ‘bloated’ public sector, regressive taxation reform to attract investment and provide incentives, and a reduction in the scope of welfare to a limited ‘safety net’ system.

Monetarist/Neoliberal Interpretation: 1974-2005
Monetarist proponents have proclaimed the increased growth rate and severely reduced inflation since the ‘revolution’ of the mid-1980s to early-1990s to be irrefutable proof and vindication of the neoliberal reform. Treasury’s response, under the apt title, ‘A Sound Economic Position’, states that the contrast between the decline of the pre-1984 epoch and the “current dynamism is largely attributable to the shift in the approach to economic management” and “good policy foundations”.

Whilst the policy regime has attracted praise – notably Evans, Grimes, and Wilkinson – it has also stimulated criticism regarding the costs and outcomes of these policies. Monetarists claim in defence that the reform measures were impeded and ill-sequenced by events outside of their control. Barriers to early labour market reform, to reductions in welfare expenditure, and to the correct sequencing of reforms led to a higher-than-desired ‘sacrifice ratio’. Furthermore, it has been claimed that not all benefits of the reforms have become manifest, and “the ultimate benefits to output can take a long time to achieve”.

A final defence cited by monetarist apologists is that the reforms are incomplete. Lange’s announcement of “a breather and a cup of tea" obstructed and delayed the necessary reforms : “further reform[s] in…education, health and welfare, are likely to be necessary if New Zealand is to achieve its potential”, and additional labour market liberalisation and tax reductions are essential to greater economic performance.


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New Zealand Economics/Keynsianism

Introduction
“When I ask two economists a question I get two different answers, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case I get three." - Sir. Winston Churchill

The central tenets of Keynesian economic thought are the rejection of the neoliberal assumption that market economies are self-regulating and market clearing, and the elevated significance of aggregated demand. Keynes himself put it best, stating, “The system is not self-adjusting and, without purposive direction, it is incapable of translating our actual poverty into potential plenty”.

Keynesian Interpretation: 1945-1973
Keynesian proponents ardently refute monetarists’ explanation of the pre-1973 period of relative prosperity, and the subsequent stagnation. Monetarists’ critically highlight the substantial per capita GDP decline after 1945, however Gould asserts that this can be attributed to a relatively high population growth rate, and compositional characteristics of the NZ economy.

A central Treasury critique was that Sir Robert Muldoon’s (Prime Minister and Finance Minister, 1975-1984) Keynesian policies had failed, engineering the disintegration of the post-war boom, and that this was unambiguous testimony to the inherent faults of Keynesian demand-management strategies and economic theory. This is stringently contested by Keynesian economists, who claim that whilst fiscal policy was an economic instrument employed by the Third National Government, the administration was “far from being a paragon of Keynesian virtue”.

Whilst Keynes promoted state investment, it had to be accurately employed. Muldoon’s heavy agricultural subsidisation (Supplementary Minimum Price) and ‘Think Big’ energy production scheme were arguably misallocated state funds, in contrast to support for the manufacturing sector (Export Performance Tax Incentives) that were successful in stimulating exports. Internal fiscal deficit did not increase sufficiently during 1975-1984 to stimulate activity in the domestic economy, negating assumptions of neutral fiscal policy based on coincidental stagnation and increasing unemployment. These assumptions also ignore the effect the Reagan administration’s Keynesian policies had on the revival of the US economy. Finally, Muldoon’s unpredictable handling of the economy can be as equally criticised from a Keynesian standpoint as much as a monetarist.

Keynesian Interpretation: 1974-2005
Empirical evidence illustrates how the reform period brought the NZ economy to its knees. Dalziel notes that if growth had continued at pre-reform rates, the income sacrificed between 1987 and 1992 was “$11 500 per working age person, or 32 percent of annual GDP”. According to Kelsey’s studies, whilst OECD countries experienced 20 percent growth between 1985-92, the NZ economy actually contracted by 1 percent. Although the period 1994-05 achieved higher real GDP growth (3.43 percent) and lower inflation (2.12 percent), growth was still significantly slower than the 1950-74 epoch (3.47 percent), and is expected to decline from 2006/07 onwards.

The worsening economic situation in the 1980s and 1990s, Keynesians believed, was chiefly due to the neoliberal strategy employed by the Fourth Labour Government. The Reserve Bank was forced to use interest rates and currency devices to ease demand for credit, as they failed to control the M3 money supply in a laissez-faire financial market. The Bank’s attempts to control rising inflation led to increased interest rates and exchange rate, harming productive businesses. The subsequent decline in profits and evaporation of investment lead to a contraction in output, and thus employment. In addition, the economic channels designed to transmit policy and market signals did not effectively communicate authorities messages, damaging much of the NZ economy. The inflexible product and wage markets reacted poorly to monetarist ambitions, and considerable inflation reduction can be attributed to diminishing real output and employment.

A patent differentiation in Keynesian thought is that the long-run trend is merely the aggregate of the short-run, as opposed to monetarism’s assumption that medium-term growth increases would outweigh the short-term slump in employment and growth generated by economic reform. Dalziel and Withwell criticise the monetarists’ disinflationary policies and aims as hysteresis and short-sighted.

For Keynesians, the heavy costs paid by New Zealanders were not worth the resultant mediocre, and possibly temporary, economic growth. Keynesian adherents believe that as long as the neoliberalism prevails as the orthodox mechanism driving policy, the NZ economy will continue to trail behind the OECD average.

title: New Zealand Economics/Keynsianism


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New Zealand Economics/Marxism

Introduction
“Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.” - Karl Marx

The key difference between Marxism and the two previously discussed approaches is that whilst monetarism and Keynesianism diverge over how the economy should be managed, Marxian economic thought considers the independent variables to be endogenous to the economy. Consequently, capitalism’s intrinsic tendency to generate crisis, characterised by growing unemployment and economic stagnation, will render state policy ineffective, regardless of which is chosen. From a Marxist perspective, therefore, exogenous shocks or government action were not considered to be the cause of the post-1973 economic deceleration.

Marxist Interpretation: 1945-1973
The principal determinant of economic growth, in Marxian economic theory, is the general level of profitability, as this largely establishes the overall intensity of productive investment. Accordingly, many scholars consider a global crisis of deficient investment and subsequent diminishing profitability as the basis for the prolonged economic slowdown of the NZ economy. The economy’s comparatively poor performance is credited to NZ’s specific economic context in the global economic arena, and the consequent reduction in terms of trade. The Marxian law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF), “because the organic composition of capital has a tendency to rise faster than the rate of surplus-value” is central to the Marxist interpretation of economics: Marx himself considered it “the most important law of modern political economy”. Strong empirical evidence disproves the criticism that the Marxian TRPF theorem is empirically unfounded and acknowledges that, by both orthodox and Marxian measures, there has been a unambiguous empirical trend of declining general profitability since 1945. This is evident in NZ, where the rate of capital return fell from an average of 16.2 percent (1967-74) to 10.3 percent (1975-84), and declining agricultural profitability. This cooling of the world economy consequently explains the weakening demand for agricultural commodities.

Three empirical studies that draw upon different sources of data (Pearce, 1986; Cochrane, 1997; Cronin, 2001) confirm the post-war decline in the rate of profit in NZ, supporting the fundamental concept that the declining general rate of profit was the fundamental cause of sluggish economic performance and elevated unemployment. Pearce’s study verifies that the key Marxian aggregates in NZ did correlate with those integral to Marxist theory, and provides a lucid explanation for the post-war boom and the evolution of structural preconditions necessary for the post-1973 prolonged crisis of capital accumulation.

The post-war rise in profit was the consequence of two main elements: the pre-war decline in the organic composition of capital, facilitating an increase in the rate of profit from 9.3 percent to 21.2 percent from 1932 to 1943 ; and the increasing rate of surplus value from 1938 to 1951 caused by strict governmental control of wages, with the compliance of the higher echelons of trade union bureaucracy. The high rate of profit from these combined factors led to increased investment in fixed capital, increased productivity of labour, and an elevated level of economic growth, sustained by technological developments in capital equipment.

Simultaneously, the technological revolution increased labour productivity and rate of surplus value, diminishing capital value. Thus the technological advances, through widespread capitalisation and mechanisation of production, increased the organic composition of capital and counteracted TRPF. Sustained increases in the rate of surplus value were ensured by labour productivity gains exceeding those in real wages. In addition, improvements in communications and transportation, historically high prices for NZ’s agricultural produce, and supportive Keynesian policies helped sustain the high rates of growth.

However, the same features responsible for the increase in the general rate of profit were responsible for undermining the long-term rate of profit: the process was internally contradictory. Whilst initially the increases in the organic composition were offset by those in the rate of surplus value, from the mid-1960s the increases became unbalanced: the rate of surplus value reached an apex, levelled, and, with the major upsurge in class struggle in the late-1960s and early 1970s, began to fall. In addition, post-war allocation of labour to non-productive roles (with respect to surplus value) in the state sector was a drain on aggregate surplus value, and contributed to depressing the rate of profit.

The afore-described account was observed globally, however, and NZ’s precipitous fall was unique amongst similarly developed countries. Other Marxist scholars suggest NZ’s highly efficient pastoral production and its capitalist development in the international division of labour are relevant, whilst others elucidate NZ’s development through the application of the Marxian theory of differential ground rent. Simply explained, it suggests that due to the comparative advantage in agricultural productivity there was a net inflow of surplus money into the NZ economy. When productivity and output growth plateaued in the mid-1960s the flow of differential rent into the economy declined, diminishing the general rate of profit and leading to the comparatively deleterious economic stagnation. Cronin argues that increased direct foreign investment and its corresponding net outflow of investment revenue and surplus value exacerbated this trend.

Marxist Interpretation: 1974-2005
Marxists tend to agree with Keynesian critiques of neoliberal/monetarist reforms, but disagree that these policies were the principal cause of NZ’s post-1984 economic failings. The sole difference between booms and prolonged capitalist crises (such as that from 1974 to the present) is the magnitude of the cyclical recessions and recoveries. A necessary condition for prolonged high economic growth rates is a sustained increase in the general rate of profit, which is then stimulated and maintained by a wave of investment in fixed capital. This in turn generates qualitative progress in labour productivity and technological development.

The ‘structural adjustments’ since 1984 have successfully increased the rate of surplus value and somewhat devalorised unprofitable fixed capital, thus increasing the general rate of profit, and explain the 1993-96 and 1999-2005 recoveries. However, the vulnerability of these recoveries are emphasised by a lack of evidence that the high profit rates of the 1950s have been re-attained. Thus, the Marxist forecast is for growth and unemployment rates similar to those experienced from 1973 to the present, significantly inferior to those between 1945 and 1973.

title: New Zealand Economics/Marxism


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New Zealand Economics/Importance Of Understanding These Interpretations

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."			- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

It is necessary to understand NZ’s changing economic landscape and its interpretations: not only do they shape our life chances, choices, and experiences, they influence politics and policy-making profoundly. Without an understanding of the collapse, without an empirically-supported interpretation of the resulting economic changes, we are doomed to repeat mistakes made by those before us.

Keynesian interpretation is used to contrast and critique monetarism, and although official policy debate centres around the choice between monetarism or Keynesian answers, the Marxist interpretation also provides criticism, focusing not only on monetarism’s damaging effects, but also on capitalism’s propensity to generate conflict, inequality, and crises.

To fully appreciate class conflict in NZ, one must understand the economic history. Without comprehension of increasing labour productivity in the 1950s and 1960s, one cannot appreciate the lack of industrial action due to employers’ economic growth ability to increase real wages, coupled with labour shortages. The cessation of rising labour productivity meant real wage increases could only be gained at the cost of declining profit rates. The industrial conflict of the late 1960s and 1970s is therefore intrinsically linked to changing economic conditions.

Similarly, with respect to female participation in paid employment, one must understand the way in which employment conditions have changed to in order to comprehend gender-specific differences in employment and the women’s movement that arose in the 1970s. Likewise, for a thorough understanding of current Maori affairs, one must be aware of the rapid urbanisation of Maori into predominantly-working class occupations caused by labour shortages in the 1950s and 1960s, and the amplified effect, therefore, of the neoliberal reforms.

Interest group activity, the basis of pluralist theory, changed markedly due to economic fortunes. Business associations and trade unions were content with Keynesian economics whilst it served their purposes, but as things soured, business associations heavily pushed a neoliberal agenda. The monetarist hegemony of the higher echelons of policy analysis and development led to the adoption of neoliberal ‘structural adjustments’, and has had a profound impact on policy and policy-generation. Treasury’s ability, along with business associations such as the New Zealand Business Roundtable, to generate and maintain neoliberalism as the prevailing economic school of thought is of concern to political scientists, and the pluralist political orthodoxy.

Changes in the economic landscape of New Zealand have had colossal effects, and an understanding of these changes, and the theoretical interpretations of them, are integral to understanding a diverse and expansive range of issues relevant to every person – today, and in the future. If we do not analyse and understand what has led our world to be what it is, future generations may themselves be condemned to repeat our mistakes.


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User:Kabl00ey

Hi! To contact me please see my page on Wikipedia. My contribution to WikiBooks is the New Zealand Economics book.

title: User:Kabl00ey


text:
Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Box Modeling

Easy to undertake and flexible, box modeling is a favorite of beginners and veterans alike. It is fun to work with and general results are visible in a short time. It is a powerful work flow that any modelers should know.

Before We Start
Before doing any modeling, it is vital to plan first. Gather references and make a general plan on how to tackle the modeling phase. Being ready will save you a lot of complications later.

The Work Flow
With box modeling, start with a primitive that is appropriate for your subject. Most start with a box and generally a good primitive to start. Then, from the primitive, using a variety of tools, mold the essential form of your model. Also called the roughing phase. Don't delve on details here, those are to be tackled later. Finally, on this form, we go to the nearly recursive process of adding details. Layer by layer, details are added until the required amount of detail is achieved.

Start with a Primitive
Select the proper primitive for your work. Most modelers start with a cube. The cube is the most flexible primitive available and is suitable to almost all form of subjects. But, in many cases, selecting other form of primitives would cut out most of the modeling required. A gun is a cinch to model using a cylinder. With a little adjustment, a torus forms a good doughnut. In an instant a ball can be made out of a sphere. So produce your primitive to work with.

Rough It Out
Take the primitive and start modifying it to capture the essential form of your subject. Tools like extrude, loop cut, scale and grab are very handy for this. Avoid worrying about details at this stage. Those are to be done later.

Adding Details, Details and more Details
Now, we approach the most difficult and unquestionably the most fun part. Using a variety of modeling tools, modify the form again to incorporate details. Add details layer by layer, from general to specific. Planning, studying and experience would help you go through. Continue until you achieve the desired level of detail.

Adding details requires subdivision or addition of polygons. The knife and the loop cut tool is handy for subdividing meshes. Extrusion is great for adding details like horns and fingers. Face and edge loop must be herded to other directions at times and warrants a study by itself. Blender provides you with required tools to achieve all of this.

At this stage, beginners and experienced modelers alike will find their meshes getting more and more difficult to work with as the mesh gets a more and more dense at each level of details added. Planning, an eye to the edge flows and experience alleviate this. So plan and keep practicing.

title: Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Box Modeling


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Formal Logic/Sentential Logic/Translations

= Translations =

The page The Sentential Language gave a very brief look at translation between English and $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$. We look at this in more detail here.

English sentential connectives
In the following discussion, we will assume the following assignment of English sentences to $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$ sentence letters:

 * $$\mathrm{P} \, : \,\!$$ 2 is a prime number.
 * $$\mathrm{Q} \, : \,\!$$ 2 is an even number.
 * $$\mathrm{R} \, : \,\!$$ 3 is an even number.

Not
The canonical translation of $$\lnot\,\!$$ into English is 'it is not the case that'. Given the assignment above,

 * (1)   $$\lnot \mathrm{P}\,\!$$

translates as

 * It is not the case that 2 is a prime number.

But we usually express negation in English simply by 'not' or by adding the contraction 'n't' to the end of a word. Thus (1) can also translate either of:

 * 2 is not a prime number.
 * 2 isn't a prime number.

If
The canonical translation of $$\rightarrow\,\!$$ into English is 'if ... then ...'. Thus

 * (2)   $$\mathrm{P} \rightarrow \mathrm{Q}\,\!$$

translates into English as

 * (3)   If 2 is a prime number, then 2 is an even number.

Objections have been raised to the canonical translation, and our example may illustrate the problem. It may seem odd to count (3) as true; however, our semantic rules does indeed count (2) as true (because both $$\mathrm{P}\,\!$$ and $$\mathrm{Q}\,\!$$ are true). We might expect that, if a conditional and its antecedent are true, the consequent is true because the antecedent is. Perhaps we expect a general rule

 * (4)   if x is a prime number, then x is an even number

to be true—but this rule is clearly false. In any case, we often expect the truth of the antecedent (if it is indeed true) to be somehow relevant to the truth of the conclusion (if that is indeed true). (2) is an exception to the usual relevance of a number being prime to a number being even.

The $$\rightarrow\,\!$$ conditional of $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$ is called the material conditional in contrast to strict conditional or counterfactual conditional. Relevance logic attempts to define a conditional which meets these objections. See also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on relevance logic.

It is generally accepted today that not all aspects of an expression's linguistic use are part of its linguistic meaning. Some have suggested that the objections to reading 'if' as a material conditional are based on conversational implicature and so not based on the meaning of 'if'. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on implicature for more information. As much as a simplifying assumption than anything else, we will adopt this point of view. We can also point out in our defense that translations need not be exact to be useful. Even if our simplifying assumption is incorrect, $$\rightarrow\,\!$$ is still the closest expression we have in $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$ to 'if'. It should also be noted that, in mathematical statements and proofs, mathematicians always use 'if' as a material conditional. They accept (2) and (3) as translations of each other and do not find it odd to count (3) as true.

'If' can occur at the beginning of the conditional or in the middle. The 'then' can be missing. Thus both of the following (in addition to (3)) translate as (2).

 * If 2 is a prime number, 2 is an even number.
 * 2 is an even number if 2 is a prime number.

Implies
We do not translate 'implies' into $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$. In particular, we reject

 * 2 is a prime number implies 2 is an even number.

as grammatically ill-formed and therefore not translatable as (2). See the Implication section of Validity for more details.

Only if
The English

 * (5)   2 is a prime number only if 2 is an even number

is equivalent to the English

 * If 2 is not an even number, then 2 is not a prime number.

This, in turn, translates into $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$ as

 * (6)   $$\lnot\mathrm{Q} \rightarrow \lnot\mathrm{P}\,\!$$

We saw at Conditionals section of Properties of Sentential Connectives that (6) is equivalent to

 * (7)   $$\mathrm{P} \rightarrow \mathrm{Q}\,\!$$

Many logic books give this as the preferred translation of (5) into $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$. This allows the convenient rule ''if' always introduces an antecedent while 'only if' always introduces a consequent'.

Like 'if', 'only if' can appear in either the first or middle position of a conditional. (5) is equivalent to

 * Only if 2 is an even number, is 2 a prime number.

Provided that
'Provided that'—and similar expressions such as 'given that' and 'assuming that'—can be use equivalently with 'if'. Thus each of the following translate into $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$ as (2).

 * 2 is an even number provided that 2 is a prime number.
 * 2 is an even number assuming that 2 is a prime number.
 * Provided that 2 is a prime number, 2 is an even number.

Prefixing 'provided that' with 'only' works the same as prefixing 'if' with only. Thus each of the following translate into $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$ as (6) or (7).

 * 2 is a prime number only provided that 2 is an even number.
 * 2 is a prime number only assuming that 2 is an even number.
 * Only provided that 2 is an even number, is 2 a prime number.

Or
The canonical translation of $$\lor\,\!$$ into English is '[either] ... or ...' (where the 'either' is optional). Thus

 * (8)   $$\mathrm{P} \lor \mathrm{Q}\,\!$$

translates into English as

 * (9)   2 is a prime number or 2 is an even number

or

 * Either 2 is a prime number or 2 is an even number.

We saw at the Interdefinability of connectives section of Expressibility that (8) is equivalent to

 * $$\lnot\mathrm{P} \rightarrow \mathrm{Q}\,\!$$

Just as there were objections to understanding 'if' as $$\rightarrow\,\!$$, there are similar objections to understanding 'or' as $$\lor\,\!$$. We will again make the simplifying assumption that we can ignore these objections.

The English 'or' has both an inclusive and—somewhat controversially—an exclusive use. The inclusive or is true when at least one disjunct is true; the exclusive or is true when exactly one disjunct is true. The $$\lor\,\!$$ operator matches the inclusive use. The inclusive use becomes especially apparent in negations. If President Bush promises not to invade Iran or North Korea, not even the best Republican spin doctors will claim he can keep his promise by invading both. The exclusive reading of (9) translates into $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$ as

 * $$(\mathrm{P} \lor \mathrm{Q}) \land \lnot(\mathrm{P} \land \mathrm{Q})\,\!$$

or more simply (and less intuitively) as

 * $$\mathrm{P} \leftrightarrow \lnot\mathrm{Q}\,\!$$

In English, telescoping is possible with 'or'. Thus, (8) translates

 * 2 is either a prime number or an even number.

Similarly,

 * $$\mathrm{Q} \lor \mathrm{R}\,\!$$

translates

 * 2 or 3 is an even number.

Unless
'Unless' has the same meaning as 'if not'. Thus

 * (10)   $$\lnot\mathrm{Q} \rightarrow \mathrm{P}\,\!$$

translates

 * (11)   2 is a prime number unless 2 is an even number

and

 * (12)   Unless 2 is an even number, 2 is a prime number.

We saw at the Interdefinability of connectives section of Expressibility that (10) is equivalent to (8). Many logic books give (8) as the preferred translation of (11) or (12) into $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$.

Nor
At the Joint denial section of Expressibility, we temporarily added $$\downarrow\,\!$$ to $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$ as the connective for joint denial. If we had that connective still available to us, we could translate

 * Neither 2 is a prime number nor 2 is an even number

as

 * $$\mathrm{P} \downarrow \mathrm{Q}\,\!$$.

However, since $$\downarrow\,\!$$ is not really in the vocabulary of $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$, we need to paraphrase. Either of the following will do:

 * (13)   $$\lnot(\mathrm{P} \lor \mathrm{Q})\,\!$$.
 * (14)   $$(\lnot\mathrm{P} \land \lnot\mathrm{Q})\,\!$$.

The same telescoping applies as with 'or'.

 * 2 is neither a prime number nor an even number

translates into $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$ as either (13) or (14). Similarly,

 * Neither 2 nor 3 is an even number

translates as either of

 * $$\lnot(\mathrm{Q} \lor \mathrm{R})\,\!$$.
 * $$(\lnot\mathrm{Q} \land \lnot\mathrm{R})\,\!$$.

And
The canonical translation of $$\land\,\!$$ into English is '[both] ... and ...' (where the 'both' is optional'). Thus

 * (15)   $$\mathrm{P} \land \mathrm{Q}\,\!$$

translates into English as

 * 2 is a prime number and 2 is an even number

or

 * Both 2 is a prime number and 2 is an even number.

Our translation of 'and' as $$\land\,\!$$ is not particularly controversial. However, 'and' is sometimes used to convey temporal order. The two sentences

 * She got married and got pregnant.
 * She got pregnant and got married.

are generally heard rather differently.

'And' has the same telescoping as 'or'.

 * 2 is both a prime number and an even number

translates into $$\mathcal{L_S}\,\!$$ as (15)

 * Both 2 and 3 are even numbers

translates as

 * $$\mathrm{Q} \land \mathrm{R}\,\!$$.

If and only if
The canonical translation of $$\leftrightarrow\,\!$$ into English is '... if and only if ...'. Thus

 * (16)   $$\mathrm{P} \leftrightarrow \mathrm{Q}\,\!$$

translates into English as

 * 2 is a prime number if and only if 2 is an even number.

The English sentence

 * (17)   2 is a prime number if and only if 2 is an even number

is a shortened form of

 * 2 is a prime number if 2 is an even number, and 2 is a prime number only if 2 is an even number

which translates as

 * $$(\mathrm{Q} \rightarrow \mathrm{P}) \land (\lnot\mathrm{Q} \rightarrow \lnot\mathrm{P})\,\!$$

or more concisely as the equivalent formula

 * (18)   $$(\mathrm{P} \rightarrow \mathrm{Q}) \land (\mathrm{Q} \rightarrow \mathrm{P})\,\!$$.

We saw at the Interdefinability of connectives section of Expressibility that (18) is equivalent to (16). Issues concerning the material versus non-material interpretations of 'if' apply to 'if and only if' as well.

Iff
Mathematicians and sometimes others use 'iff' as an abbreviated form of 'if and only if'. So

 * 2 is a prime number iff 2 is an even number

abbreviates (17) and translates as (16).


text:
User:Pentawing

Pentawing - Please see my user page at Wikipedia.

title: User:Pentawing


text:
User talk:Cspurrier

Oops
Thanks for catching 81.42.156.202's edits. I was reverting the Beating Season vandalism and it looks like that got lost in the reverting as well. For the record I leave anonymous votes and comments, because they can be useful. The admin in determining the vote can choose to weigh the votes differently anyway. MShonle 01:27, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
 * I expected as much, but you never know with some admins :). Thanks for the note --Cspurrier 01:39, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Confirming Meta adminship request
I am the same user as meta:user:cspurrier and n:user:cspurrier--Cspurrier 04:55, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the rollbacks
Thank you for the rollbacks. I wonder what made the IP vandalize this small peaceful web site, not wikipedia... - Marsian / talk 04:51, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
 * It was a vandal bot, it appears it was programmed to attack until it was blocked and then move on. It hit Wikipedia,Wiktionary,Wikibooks,Meta, and Wikiquote, in that order.It may have continued on to other Wikis, but Brion blocked it WMF wide.--Cspurrier 23:13, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for Support
Hey... I just wanted to drop by and thank you for your support for adminship. I really do want to help... btw...what part of SC... I grew up in Columbia...--Mfinney 06:08, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
 * NP, Good luck. I live about 45mins outside of Columbia. --Cspurrier 18:34, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

General voting rules/Proposal
I want to call the attention of all wikibookians, especially active admins to the discussion about the new voting policy. Wikibooks currently does not have a concrete voting policy in effect, so the adaptation of this policy will potentially create immediate differences in the way business is conducted here. Due to large amounts of discussion, changes, and dissention, there are several versions of this policy being considered:

 * Version 1 Written by User:Whiteknight
 * Version 2 Written by User:Jguk
 * Version 3 User:RobinH's revision of Jguk's version
 * Version 4 Written by User:Kellen
 * Version 5 Whiteknight's Revision of Kellen's Version.

Also, there are additional issues being discussed, such as the inclusion of a "minimum contributions" clause, that will limit users with less then 20 votes from editing. Also, there is a proposed clause that would allow this 20 vote minimum to be raised in response to abuse.

I am sending this same message to all currently active admins. I hope you are able to come in and give your opinions on this matter. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:47, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Vandalism
Could you do a favor for me? I need an administrator to delete part of the history of The Computer Revolution. Someone vandalised this page and the vandalism has been reverted, but they also vandalised the edit summary, so every time I look at the history of this article I see the word ____ written over and over again. I understand if you don't want to do it, you might not want to if you don't want to look at words like that. Thank you! --24.71.223.148 03:38, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Would like to hear your opinion...
Take a look into Policies and guidelines/Vote/What is Wikibooks a proposed policy decission page and cast your vote, txs. --Panic 04:33, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

(I'm sorry you didn't receive a welcome message early but...) Welcome message
Hello, and welcome to Wikibooks!

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You will find more resources in Community Portal. If you want to ask a question, visit the Study help desk, the Staff lounge, IRC channel or ask me personally on my talk page. For site news, see the Bulletin board. It might be a good idea to add this page to your "watchlist" so that you can see when any new information is posted there. You can do that by clicking the tab labeled "watch" at the top of the page.

Good luck! --Panic 00:49, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks --Cspurrier 00:03, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

WCI 2011 : Accelerating Wikibooks : Would like to discuss!
Hello!

I will be delivering a Talk at the Wikimedia Conference India 2011 on the topic of "Accelerating Wikibooks".

Over the next few days, I aim to make the proposal more and more wholesome and relevant. I'd like to discuss with you about the proposal and hope you can recommend me a few names on Wikibooks with whom I can discuss this.

I'd be very happy if you could discuss the proposal at User:Thewinster/Accelerating_Wikibooks

--Thewinster (discuss • contribs) 08:20, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

Summary of the proposal
This is not a summary of the final talk, only a tentative guideline.

 * Create Roadmaps for a book
 * Define Learning Outcomes
 * Annotate and Discuss new content available from around the web.
 * Minor tweaks and fixes which concentrate on crowdsourcing.
 * Identifying Small Contribution that advance a book and designing good UIs and triggers according to B.J. Fogg's Behavior Change Model, 8 Step Design Process. The paper can be found here at Persuasive Design : Eight Step Process by B. J. Fogg

title: User talk:Cspurrier