Struggling with Tradition

Europe's struggling mammals

One year ago, JJ1 was Europe's most famous mammal. The male brown bear, also known by the more amiable name of 'Bruno', had wandered into Southern Germany from the Trentino in Italy. The appearance of this charismatic animal in a region where the last bear had been seen and killed 170 years ago seemed to fit a trend. Over the past ten years, wolves, elks, beavers and lynxes have been highly pub...

Ivan Grech Struggling Against Isolation

Islands and their problems have elicited a dominant place in maritime historiography. Whether vital stations along important shipping routes or marginal places often by-passed by civilizations and history, their role and condition, their subsistence, their centrality to the flow of goods and the diffusion of cultures and, most prominently, their supposed isolation have much intrigued scholars o...

Beyond Tradition

Reconstructing Quine: the Troubles with a Tradition*

There has developed in the professional literature a distinct tradition of interpreting and reconstructing Quine’s epistemology. The tradition has its roots in Gilbert Harman’s influential interpretation of Quine as an empiricist and in Harman’s reconstruction of Quine’s views on meaning.’ Richard Rorty, and those influenced by what may fairly be called the “Princeton School” of Quine scholarsh...

The Eureka Effect: Exploring the Benefits of Struggling with Technology

This research in progress piece adds two interesting theoretical insights to traditional models of adoption. First, it introduces the Eureka effect, which suggests that some types of usage challenges can actually increase satisfaction with the system--even if they decrease the user's perceived ease of use. Second, it expands on expectationdisconfirmation adoption models to carefully problematiz...