Search results

Purpose – This chapter details the collaborative investigation of a neuroscientist and a literature scholar into whether reading literature increases empathy in health professionals, pre-health professionals and students outside of health care. It also reflects on the role of different epistemologies that inform researchers’ approaches, and muses on how ethnicity, sexual orientation and class inform research and teaching

Methodology/Approach – Students watched or read Margaret Edson’s play W;t and were asked if the medical drama increased their sense of appropriate empathy in medical encounters. The original research employed the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy, electromyography and galvanic skin response to measure physiological markers of empathy. These results were then compared to the self-reflection of participants to determine whether or not the physiological responses mirrored the self-report. The reflections on how emotion impacted the research were primarily narrative essay-based accompanied by feminist other literary theories.

Findings – All participants in the original study reported an increase in empathy after reading or viewing the play. This affect was even stronger when they viewed a live performance. The researchers determined that the role that their ethnicity, age, sexual orientation and class needed further study, perhaps with different pieces of literature.

Originality/Value – This chapter reflects the interdisciplinary and epistemological challenges of two researchers from very different backgrounds and training and investigates the relationship between reading, physiological empathy and perceptions of empathy. It considers the difficult and controversial challenges to quantifying emotions and the role emotions play in academic collaboration.

Unlike Joss Whedon's cult series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Angel (1999–2004) and Firefly (2002–2003), Dollhouse (2009–2010) is largely considered to be both a critical and commercial failure. Dollhouse is often dismissed as Whedon's worst television series, with critics citing their discomfort and disgust in watching hero Echo's (Eliza Dushku) repeated exploitation. Unlike other popular acclaimed TV series featuring a female action hero like Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), Alias (2002–2006) and Nikita (2010–2013), the hero of Dollhouse is not empowered from the series' outset, but rather she slowly comes to her power and agency due to various traumatic and violent experiences. This chapter argues that Dollhouse stages a reworking of the cinematic female action hero figure by delaying empowerment and forcing the audience to linger in the hero's lack of agency. Dollhouse enables an unpacking of the female action hero popularised in films like Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), The Fifth Element (1997) and the Alien franchise (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997). By exposing the mechanics of hero-creation, Dollhouse forces viewers to consider how heroes are made and who is exploited in the process. As such, this chapter considers Dollhouse as an intervention into the female action hero film and television cycle through an analysis of how the series adheres to and subverts the tropes of the cycle.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to elaborate on the major conceptual and practical considerations of the use of robots, artificial intelligence and service automation (RAISA) in travel, tourism, and hospitality companies (TTH).

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter develops a conceptual framework of the major issues related to the use of RAISA in the travel, tourism and hospitality context.

Findings: The findings indicate that while there is a creeping incursion of RAISA into TTH, there are major concerns that the TTH industry has to consider in regard to automating TTH services.

Practical implications: In a practical sense, the chapter identifies the decisions that TTH industry professionals need to take when dealing with RAISA technologies. Furthermore, the chapter elaborates on the impacts RAISA have on business operations, marketing management, human resources and financial management of TTH companies. The TTH industry has to adjust its practices and communicate with its workforce in ways as not to increase Luddite tendencies and resistance among employees.

Social implications: The analysis shows that there is an upcoming era in which automation of services will be so advanced that wealthy countries may not need to import labour to make up with its own aging workforce, suggesting that RAISA and its further development has the potential for disrupting society and international relations.

Originality/value: This chapter provides a comprehensive review of the issues related to the use of RAISA in the TTH industry, including the drivers of RAISA adoption in tourism, advantages and disadvantages of RAISA technologies compared to human employees, decisions that managers need to take, and the impacts of RAISA on business processes. It shows how macroenvironmental pressures shape the microeconomic decisions to use RAISA in a TTH context.

Purpose – Emissions trading is often heralded as an efficient approach to environmental regulation. In the mid-90s Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), a Los Angeles-based advocacy organization, raised concerns that emissions trading in the South Coast Air Basin, the most polluted region in Southern California, would result in environmental injustice. The organizations concerns received mixed responses from regulators. Historical analysis is used to assess the clash between emissions trading and environmental justice (EJ).

Methodology/approach – Emissions trading and EJ arose side by side between the 1960s and the 1990s, yet they disagree on how to clean the air. Historical analysis of legal documents, presidential addresses, letters, working papers, reports, and the like offers a better understanding of the development of emissions trading and EJ, and their intersection in environmental policy.

Findings – Emissions trading was grafted onto Clean Air Act policies not inherently designed for their incorporation. As a result, emissions trading came into direct philosophical opposition with EJ as political pressures calling for both economically efficient antiregulatory-ism and environmental equity forced their intersection. Formally, regional and national government accepted EJ as part of law. However, in principle, emissions trading undermined this acceptance. As a result, CBE could not easily win or explicitly lose its battle against emissions trading.

Originality/value of paper – Previous work on the relationship between emissions trading and EJ tend to focus on legal analysis and normative implications of emissions trading. Putting emissions trading and environment justice into historical perspective helps to illuminate larger questions about EJ activism and policy. Also, as California, the United States, and Europe turn to emissions trading to combat not only air pollution but also climate change, important lessons can be learned from the histories and collision of emissions trading and EJ.

Current research about American Indians of all ages is in short supply, yet design and allocation of public services and resources are increasingly guided by ‘evidence’ provided by research. The health and wellness of this population is persistently poorer than that of other marginalized populations. American Indian tribes have been beset progressively since the earliest arrival of European settlers by both malevolent and well-intentioned assaults on their cultures and peoples. This long history of cultural and physical genocide continues into the present and undermines the effectiveness of Eurocentric processes for research that have been shaped by values and beliefs antithetical to those of most tribes (e.g. individualism, proprietary ownership, science as the way of knowing). Individual and collective historical trauma is present in all of the more than 500 federally recognized tribes in the United States of America, and a lack of trust further compromises the validity and positive impact of most research. This chapter describes the roots and foundations of flawed and successful research and identifies practical resources and approaches that are valid and beneficial for conducting research with indigenous people. The processes described in this chapter are grounded in the experiences of tribes in the United States of America; however, parallel experiences of indigenous populations that have a continuing legacy of trauma are found in many other countries (such as in Brazil and New Zealand) and the insights and approaches found in this chapter may be applicable to some degree.

This chapter focuses on the culturally assumed link between femininity and pregnancy. It situates itself using the feminist theories of performativity (Butler, 1990), female masculinity (Halbertstam, 1998) and the queer art of failure (Halberstam, 2011). The chapter is based on ethnographic research with butch lesbians and genderqueer individuals in British Columbia, Canada. It focuses on these individuals’ desires to experience pregnancy, find appropriate clothes to wear when pregnant, and not being simultaneously socially recognized as both pregnant and masculine. It argues that feminism is still needed to broaden how we gender pregnancy, and to challenge the assumptions and social pressures that link individuals with uteruses to female to femininity to pregnancy and motherhood.

Presents a review on implementing finite element methods on supercomputers, workstations and PCs and gives main trends in hardware and software developments. An appendix included at the end of the paper presents a bibliography on the subjects retrospectively to 1985 and approximately 1,100 references are listed.

The statements which have recently been made in various quarters to the effect that Danish butter is losing its hold on the English market, that its quality is deteriorating, and that the sale is falling off, are not a little astonishing in face of the very strong and direct evidence to the contrary furnished by the official records. As an example of the kind of assertions here alluded to may be instanced an opinion expressed by a correspondent of the British Food Journal, who, in a letter printed in the March number, stated that “My own opinion is that the Danes are steadily losing their good name for quality, owing to not using preservatives and to their new fad of pasteurising… .”

THE re‐opening of air offensive action on both sides, which marked the later part of January, is likely to complicate life considerably for librarians. The lull that has been enjoyed during the Russian operations, and is probably owing to them, may prove to have been deceptive. We do not know yet how much further the destruction of buildings—and amongst them libraries—will go before a decision is reached. We suppose by now that every librarian has taken every precaution within his power to preserve his stock and his service : more than that it is hardly possible to do with the resources to which we are now restricted.