Thousands of people will suffer and die this year because we do not donate enough substances of human origin, including blood plasma. To solve this, some recommend that we allow commercial organizations to assist in collecting these and that we permit donor compensation as a tool to encourage donations. Many object to these proposals, including for semiotic or expressive reasons. But insofar as these objections rely on meanings and these meanings are social constructs, we can revise the meaning of these practices to avoid commodification. Revision may work in principle, but in practice some complain that changing meanings may be too difficult or practically infeasible. This essay attempts to show that this is not so in a wide range of cases and uses the case of commercial compensated blood plasma collection as an illustration. Getting people to conceive of this practice not as payment for blood plasma but as compensation for the time, effort, and inconvenience associated with the giving of plasma is practically feasible and preferable to prohibition.

Legal theorists agree widely on two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the existence of a legal system: a legal system exists if (i) legal officials adopt a critically reflective attitude toward the legal system’s foundational rule, and (ii) the substantive laws of the system are “by and large” efficacious. The latter “efficacy condition” plausibly applies to all posited law, paradigmatically including modern centralized legal systems and less paradigmatic instances like international law. And yet, philosophers have also frequently pointed out the difficulty in determining precisely what this efficacy amounts to. In this article, I argue that the persisting difficulty of explaining the efficacy of law results from three tempting but inadequate assumptions about posited law and that our basic assumptions need to be revised accordingly.

The article takes Boethius’s theory of musical harmony as a starting point, in particular studying the collective dimension embedded in this concept. The dynamics of contact and interdetermination, between humans and other-than-human, are explored and understood as factors co-involved in the possibility of common living. The role of the notions of ecology and economy in rereading the concept of harmony provided by Boethius’s theory is also reviewed. The text then explores a site-specific work that experiments with these issues through the creation of an acousmatic patch that is superimposed onto a broken ecology, showing how this serves as an agent for a reharmonisation of a drought-ravaged river. The article concludes by addressing the implications that a territorially situated musical approach might represent for recovery of the broken link between humans and the other-than-human.

LexisNexis’ Matthew Leopold explains how his team conducted a wide range of interviews with those involved in the legal education system – including librarians, academics, heads of law schools and university leaders – in order to gauge their feelings and thoughts on the impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have, and is having, on the sector. Matthew then goes through the findings, which shows a diverse set of views on AI.

This study explores the effects of World Englishes teaching practice in improving EFL learners’ self-confidence in English-speaking performance (SCIESP) with a mixed methodology design comprising both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Data were gathered through a survey with the Self-Confidence in English-speaking Performance Questionnaire, students’ reflective notes, and focus group interviews. Two teaching classes with no significant difference in self-confidence were randomly chosen as the experimental class (EC) and control class (CC). The two classes shared the same teaching implication except that the EC had four lectures on World Englishes while the CC got four lectures on English History. After one semester the research team surveyed students’ SCIESP again. The result showed a remarkable improvement in students’ SCIESP in EC than in CC. It was found that World Englishes teaching contributed significantly to increasing students’ SCIESP.

Much of the theory of large cardinals beyond a measurable cardinal concerns the structure of elementary embeddings of the universe of sets into inner models. This paper seeks to answer the question of whether the inner model uniquely determines the elementary embedding.