The marketization of poverty

Increasingly, transnational corporations (TNCs) see themselves, and are seen by multilateral development organizations and national governments, as part of the solution to global poverty alleviation. Guided by C. K. Prahalad's theories about the "bottom of the pyramid" (BoP), TNCs are developing products and services for the billions of people living on a few dollars a day that are supposed to enable these poor people to enterprise themselves out of poverty. In the process, poverty and the poor are made amenable to market interventions by being constituted as a potential new market for TNCs. Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) e-Inclusion program was the first corporate-wide BoP initiative in the high-tech industry that aimed to create corporate and social benefits. An analysis of its companyinternal evolution from an intrapreneurial initiative to a fully incorporated business operation is complemented by a study of e-Inclusion's activities in Costa Rica, which aimed to improve the lives of rural Costa Ricans by providing access to HP technology and by creating new sources of income for electronic entrepreneurs. However, transforming the poor into protoconsumers of TNC products and services cannot address the structural drivers of their circumstances and will lead to neither the eradication of poverty nor a corporate fortune at the BoP. © 2011 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved

Heterogeneity and standardization in data, use, and annotation : a diachronic corpus of German

This paper describes the standardization problems that come up in a diachronic corpus: it has to cope with differing standards with regard to diplomaticity, annotation, and header information. Such highly heterogeneous texts must be standardized to allow for comparative research without (too much) loss of information

Self-reflection as dialectic: How we can follow the Delphian calling to self-knowledge whilst avoiding Narcissus' fate

Self-reflection refers to our ability to think about ourselves and our lives and to ask and answer questions ranging from "Who am I?" to "Why did I do this?". It is thus considered a valuable means to gain self-knowledge. Structurally, reflection involves two elements, a reflecting and a reflected-on, in other words a subject and an object. In the case of self- reflection, subject and object are the same, the reflecting is the reflected-on. As subject and object are traditionally conceived of as radically opposed i.e. mutually exclusive, this situation has led to considering self-reflection problematic: If self-reflection is always reflection on an object, it is thought that self-reflection cannot yield insight into oneself qua subject and might even represent a danger to one’s subjectivity which is characteristic of lived life. Refuting the mutual exclusiveness of subject and object, self-reflection can be regained as a valuable means to gain self-knowledge. It is thereby going to be demonstrated that self-reflection has a dialectical structure. The nature of the self-knowledge yielded by self-reflection conceived of as dialectic is going to be explored. A final part shows how a dialectical account of self- reflection proves useful in clarifying the role which self-reflection plays in schizophrenia

A thermodynamic formalism approach to the Selberg zeta function for Hecke triangle surfaces of infinite area

We provide an explicit construction of a cross section for the geodesic flow on infinite-area Hecke triangle surfaces which allows us to conduct a transfer operator approach to the Selberg zeta function. Further we construct closely related cross sections for the billiard flow on the associated triangle surfaces and endow the arising discrete dynamical systems and transfer operator families with two weight functions which presumably encode Dirichlet respectively Neumann boundary conditions. The Fredholm determinants of these transfer operator families constitute dynamical zeta functions, which provide a factorization of the Selberg zeta function of the Hecke triangle surfaces.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure

Communication, decision-making and the optimal degree of transparency of monetary policy committees

This paper develops a theoretical model of dynamic decision-making of a monetary policy committee with heterogeneous members. It investigates the optimal transparency, and the optimal way of transmitting information of committees, by analysing the effects different communication strategies have on financial markets. It is shown that the communication strategy of the central bank committee has a significant effect on the predictability of monetary policy decisions when there is asymmetric information between the committee and market agents. Transparency about the diversity of views of the committee surrounding the economic outlook makes future monetary policy more predictable. However, communicating the diversity of views regarding monetary policy decisions may lead to less predictability of monetary policy in the short term. In addition, it is shown that communication in the form of voting records has the greatest effect on market participants' near term policy expectations. These results support findings of the empirical literature and have strong implications for the optimal communication strategies of committees including the question whether individual voting records should be published. --Monetary Policy Committees,Uncertainty,Communication,Transparency