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Sovereign Wealth Funds are government investment vehicles that have been present for decades. They are usually characterized by minimum information disclosure, however, this situation differed after worldwide events shed light on the role they possess to mitigate their downturns. The substantial economic influence they bring along due to their size and long term impact have recently created an uproar of debate that eventually led to the ratification of the Santiago Principles. The Principles set the stage for governing SWFs' operations and grant them more clarity. They also contribute to a more stable environment for cross-border investment flows. With the importance of SWFs, emerging economies also rose as key institutional investors; only this time they called for harnessing their funds towards sustainable development investment strategies. Despite pressuring need to improve transparency and governance structures of SWFs in EMs, the former are regarded as promising means for achieving the sustainable development goals.
Is China part of the world? Based on much of the political, media, and popular discourse in the West the answer is seemingly no. Even after four decades of integration into the global socioeconomic system, discussions of China continue to be underpinned by a core assumption: that the country represents a fundamentally different 'other' that somehow exists outside the 'real' world. Either implicitly or explicitly, China is generally depicted as an external force with the potential to impact on the 'normal' functioning of things. This core assumption, of China as an orientalised, externalised, and separate 'other', ultimately produces a distorted image of both China and the world. This Element seeks to illuminate the ways in which the country and people form an integral part of the global capitalist system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Richard Eden's Decades has long been recognised as a landmark in the translation and circulation of information concerning the Americas in England. What is often overlooked in Eden's book is the presence of the first two Tudor voyage accounts to have been committed to print, assembled in haste and added late in the printing process. Both concern English commercial ventures to the West African coast, undertaken despite vehement Portuguese protests and in the midst of the profound alteration of the Marian succession. Both are complex, contradictory, and innovative experiments in generic form and content. This Element closely examines Eden's assembly and framing of these accounts, engaging with issues of material culture, travel writing, new knowledge, race, and the negotiation of political and religious change. In the process it repositions West Africa and Eden at the heart of a lost history of early English expansionism.
This Element has two main purposes. Firstly, it discusses purposes, advantages, and disadvantages as well as the challenges of different formats of language assessment, concluding with a focus on educator-administered language assessment in early childhood and education programs. It addresses the selection of assessment domains, the trade-off between brevity and precision, the challenge of assessing bilinguals, and accommodating the requirements of funders (e.g., government agencies) and users (e.g., educators and schools). It draws on lessons learned from developing two instruments for a national Danish-language and preliteracy assessment program. Secondly, it introduces those two educator-administered instruments-Language Assessment 3-6 (LA 3-6) and Language Assessment 2-year-olds (LA 2)-with respect to content, norming, gender and socioeconomic influences as well as psychometric qualities. The intention is that this experience can help enable the extension of the educator-based approach to other languages and contexts, while simultaneously acknowledging that linguistic and cultural adaptations are crucial.
This Element explores relationships between collocations, writing quality, and learner and contextual variables in a first-year composition (FYC) programme. Comprising three studies, the Element is anchored in understanding phraseological complexity and its sub-constructs of sophistication and diversity. First, the authors look at sophistication through association measures. They tap into how these measures may tell us different types of information about collocation via a cluster analysis. Selected measures from this clustering are used in a cumulative links model to establish relationships between these measures, measures of diversity and measures of task, the language background of the writer and individual writer variation, and writing quality scores. A third qualitative study of the statistically significant predictors helps understand how writers use collocations and why they might be favoured or downgraded by raters. This Element concludes by considering the implications of this modelling for assessment.
There is debate about how coarticulation is represented in speakers' mental grammar, as well as the role that coarticulation plays in explaining synchronic and diachronic sound patterns across languages. This Element takes an individual-differences approach in examining nasal coarticulation in production and perception in order to understand how coarticulation is used phonologically in American English. Experiment 1 examines coarticulatory variation across 60 speakers. The relationship between speaking rate and coarticulation is used to classify three types of coarticulation. Experiment 2 is a perception study relating the differences in realization of coarticulation across speakers to listeners' identification of lexical items. The author demonstrates that differences in speaker-specific patterns of coarticulation reflect differences in the phonologization of vowel nasalization. Results support predictions made by models that propose an active role by both speakers and listeners in using coarticulatory variation to express lexical contrasts and view coarticulation as represented in an individual's grammar.
Although the subject matter of this Element is properties, do not expect in-depth introductions to the various views on properties 'on the market'. Instead, here that subject matter is treated meta-philosophically. Rather than ask and try to answer a question like do properties exist? this Element asks what reasons one might have for thinking that properties exist (what problem properties, if they exist, are there to solve), what counts as solving that (or those) problems (including what counts as 'a property'), as well as how we ought to proceed when trying to find out if properties exist (by which method this ought to be decided). As it turns out, these questions and their answers are all intricately intertwined. Theory comparison and theory evaluation is in other words (and perhaps not that surprisingly) tricky. Do properties exist? After reading this Element all we can say is therefore this: that depends.
This Element explores the nature of both imagination and creative thinking in an effort to understand the relation between them and also to understand their role in the vast array of activities in which they are typically implicated, from art, music, and literature to technology, medicine, and science. Focusing on the contemporary philosophical literature, it will take up several interrelated questions: What is imagination, and how does it fit into the cognitive architecture of the mind? What is creativity? Is imagination required for creativity? Is creativity required for imagination? Is a person simply born either imaginative or not (and likewise, either creative or not), or are imagination and creativity skills that can be cultivated? And finally, are imagination and creativity uniquely human capacities, or can they be had by nonbiological entities such as AI systems?
The goal of this Element is to provide a detailed introduction to adaptive inventories, an approach to making surveys adjust to respondents' answers dynamically. This method can help survey researchers measure important latent traits or attitudes accurately while minimizing the number of questions respondents must answer. The Element provides both a theoretical overview of the method and a suite of tools and tricks for integrating it into the normal survey process. It also provides practical advice and direction on how to calibrate, evaluate, and field adaptive batteries using example batteries that measure variety of latent traits of interest to survey researchers across the social sciences.
After over a century of grand theorizing about the universal dimensions to the practice of ritual sacrifice, scholars now question the analytical utility of the notion writ large. The word 'sacrifice' (Latin sacrificium) itself frequently is broken down into its Latin roots, sacer, sacred, and facere, to do or to make – to do or to make sacred – which is a huge category and also vague. Presuming it is people and places that are made sacred, we must question the dynamics. Does sacrifice 'make sacred' by summoning the presence of gods or ancestors? By offering gifts to them? By dining with them? By restoring or establishing cosmic order? By atoning for personal or collective sins? By rectifying social disequilibrium through scapegoating? By inducing an existential epiphany about life and death? While this short Element cannot cover all complexities and practices, it does treat critically some prominent themes, theories, and controversies concerning sacrifice, from ancient to present times.
Olympe de Gouges, though a well-known historical figure, has not been investigated as a philosopher until quite recently. Yet, many of her writings have philosophical import, whether they are written in the genre of the philosophical treatise, drama or political pamphlets. In the three main sections, the author gives an overview of some of her arguments, showing their originality and their relevance to debates contemporary to her and to us. In the introduction, the author addresses the question of genre and argue that Gouges should be read as a philosopher, as well as a playwright and political writer. In the conclusion, the author draws out the relevance of her work for contemporary philosophers.
Parceling is pre-modeling strategy to create fewer and more reliable indicators of constructs for use with latent variable models. Parceling is particularly useful for developmental scientists because longitudinal models can become quite complex and even intractable when measurement models of items are fit. In this Element the authors provide a detailed account of the advantages of using parcels, their potential pitfalls, as well as the techniques for creating them for conducting latent variable structural equation modeling (SEM) in the context of the developmental sciences. They finish with a review of the recent use of parcels in developmental journals. Although they focus on developmental applications of parceling, parceling is also highly applicable to any discipline that uses latent variable SEM.
This Element introduces the philosophy of Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904), a very well-known moral theorist, advocate of animal welfare and women's rights, and critic of Darwinism and atheism in the Victorian era. After locating Cobbe's achievements within nineteenth-century British culture, this Element examines her duty-based moral theory of the 1850s and then her 1860s accounts of duties to animals, women's rights, and the mind and unconscious thought. From the 1870s, in critical response to Darwin's evolutionary ethics, Cobbe put greater moral weight on the emotions, especially sympathy. She now criticised atheism for undermining morality, emphasised women's duties to develop virtues of character, and recommended treating animals with sympathy and compassion. The Element links Cobbe's philosophical arguments to her campaigns for women's rights and against vivisection, brings in critical responses from her contemporaries, explains how she became omitted from the history of philosophy, and shows the lasting importance of her work.
Tracing her intellectual development from her university years, when she was trained in a Cartesian and neo-Kantian philosophical tradition, to her final decade, during which she was recognised as having inspired the emerging strands of late twentieth-century feminism, Beauvoir is shown to have been among the most influential philosophical voices of the mid twentieth century. Countering the recent trend to read her in isolation from Sartre, she is shown to have both adopted, adapted, and influenced his philosophy, most importantly through encouraging him to engage with Hegel and to consider our relations with others. The Second Sex is read in the light of her existentialist humanism and ultimately faulted for having succumbed too uncritically to the masculine myth that it is men who are solely responsible for society's intellectual and cultural history.
The Pythagorean women are a group of female philosophers who were followers of Pythagoras and are credited with authoring a series of letters and treatises. In both stages of the history of Pythagoreanism – namely, the fifth-century Pythagorean societies and the Hellenistic Pythagorean writings – the Pythagorean woman is viewed as an intellectual, a thinker, a teacher, and a philosopher. The purpose of this Element is to answer the question: what kind of philosopher is the Pythagorean woman? The traditional picture of the Pythagorean female sage is that of an expert of the household. The author argues that the available evidence is more complex and conveys the idea of the Pythagorean woman as both an expert on the female sphere and a well-rounded thinker philosophising about the principles of the cosmos, human society, the immortality of the soul, numbers, and harmonics.
This Element introduces the areas that second language (L2) pragmatics research has investigated. It begins with a theme-based review of the field with respect to L2 pragmatics learning, teaching, and assessing. The section on pragmatics learning examines studies on learners' pragmatic production and perception, and analyzes research modalities in this field. The section on pragmatics teaching examines the effects of and different approaches to L2 pragmatics instruction; and the section on pragmatics assessing examines the aspects involved in testing learners' pragmatic competence, and studies on issues related to validity and rating in pragmatics assessing. The Element then analyzes studies exploring learners' cognitive processes during pragmatic performance, and case studies are provided to showcase two ongoing projects, one investigating advanced learners' self-praise on social media and the other investigating lingua franca pragmatics among children. Finally, the Element offers some topics and questions for future research in L2 pragmatics.
Sentiment analysis has gained widespread adoption in many fields, but not—until now—in literary studies. Scholars have lacked a robust methodology that adapts the tool to the skills and questions central to literary scholars. Also lacking has been quantitative data to help the scholar choose between the many models. Which model is best for which narrative, and why? By comparing over three dozen models, including the latest Deep Learning AI, the author details how to choose the correct model—or set of models—depending on the unique affective fingerprint of a narrative. The author also demonstrates how to combine a clustered close reading of textual cruxes in order to interpret a narrative. By analyzing a diverse and cross-cultural range of texts in a series of case studies, the Element highlights new insights into the many shapes of stories.
Foundationalism is a view about the structure of knowledge and justification. The heart of the thesis is the claim that if there is any knowledge or justified belief at all, then there is a kind of knowledge and justified belief that does not require inference from something else known or justifiably believed. This Element begins by exploring abstract arguments for foundationalism and against proposed alternatives. It then explores disagreements among foundationalists about how to understand foundational knowledge and justified belief, what is plausibly included in the foundations, and what is required for legitimate inference from foundations to the rest of what we believe. The author argues for the conclusion that one can combine insights captured by different versions of foundationalism by making a distinction between ideal justification and justification that falls short of that ideal.
By pooling together exhaustive analyses of certain philosophical paradoxes, we can prove a series of fascinating results regarding philosophical progress, agreement on substantive philosophical claims, knockdown arguments in philosophy, the wisdom of philosophical belief (quite rare, because the knockdown arguments show that we philosophers have been wildly wrong about language, logic, truth, or ordinary empirical matters), the epistemic status of metaphysics, and the power of philosophy to refute common sense. As examples, this Element examines the Sorites Paradox, the Liar Paradox, and the Problem of the Many – although many other paradoxes can do the trick too.
This Element explores approaches to locating and examining social identity in corpora with and without the aid of demographic metadata. This is a key concern in corpus-aided studies of language and identity, and this Element sets out to explore the main challenges and affordances associated with either approach and to discern what either approach can (and cannot) show. It describes two case studies which each compare two approaches to social identity variables – sex and age – in a corpus of 14-million words of patient comments about NHS cancer services in England. The first approach utilises demographic tags to group comments according to patients' sex/age while the second involves categorising cases where patients disclose their sex/age in their comments. This Element compares the findings from either approach, with the approaches themselves being critically discussed in terms of their implications for corpus-aided studies of language and identity.