JOHN Z. BOWERS, When the twain meet. The rise of western medicine in Japan, (Henry E. Sigerist Supplements to the Bulletin ofthe History ofMedicine, No. 8), Baltimore, Md., and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. xi, 173, £8.50. This book shares the same characteristics as its predecessor, Western medical pioneers in feudal Japan (Johns Hopkins, 1970), in that it is encylopae...

“Open science" as a practise became increasing widespread in Europe during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It represented a departure from the previously dominant ethos of secrecy in the pursuit of Nature’s Secrets, and its emergence was a distinctive and vital organisational aspect of the Scientific Revolution. The development of norms of disclosure and demonstration, and t...

Barberos, cirujanos, y gente de mar is a comprehensive examination of naval sanitary policies and their impact on the process of professionalization of the medical practitioners working for the navy during the eighteenth century. It covers the period from the end of the War of Succession to the defeat of the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805-the beginning of the decline of Spanish naval...

In his book What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules?, Goran Therborn draws the distinction, following Nicos Poulantzas, between state power and the state apparatus. Furthermore, he defines state power as " a relation between social class forces expressed in the content of state policies, " and says that it " is exercised through the state apparatus, or more precisely, through a system of st...

A vast literature has been produced since the 1980s on the emergence of Islamist movements in the Middle East. This literature offers different rationales for the emergence of new kinds of foes to the political regimes of the region. Filling the void left by the leftist opposition, the Islamist militants appeared around the 1970s as new political actors. They were expected neither by the state ...

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to solve dialogue policy optimisation. Traditional RL algorithms, however, fail to scale to large domains due to the curse of dimensionality. We propose a novel Dialogue Management architecture, based on Feudal RL, which decomposes the decision into two steps; a first step where a master policy selects a subset of primitive actions, and a seco...

The Han character sphere, including Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China, adopted Han characters and classical Han writing as the official written language before the 20 century. However, great changes came with the advent of the 20th century. After World War II, Han characters in Vietnam and Korea were officially replaced by the romanized Chu Quoc Ngu and phonemic Hangul, respectively. In J...

Understanding the power dimension of information use is important in developing and implementing information systems. The essay is a description of a research model for conceptualizing the politics of information within organizations. The essay presents a perspective on organizational culture as an information landscape, its dimensionalities, and the political frame of information use. In intro...

For most Chinese people, family (jia or jiating) is a simple as well as a complex concept. It is simple because everybody has a family (or families) and thus knows what it is. It is complex because different individuals have different explanations about families. Quite often, the answer to the question, “What is a family?” is “it depends. . . .” In traditional Chinese society, family was anothe...

1. The Problem. Marx is undeniably a fierce critic of a capitalist organization of economic activity. By what standards does Marx assess capitalism and find it objectionable? In many passages it seems that Marx's critique is based upon notions of justice and fairness which in his opinion capitalism flagrantly fails to satisfy. In the "Communist Manifesto," contrasting the phenomenon of exploita...