Beta Phase Communities: Open Source Software as Gift Economy

In this paper, I discuss how gift economy tenets exist within capitalist systems and in what ways the alternative logic of gift economies could be used within capitalist firms to create a more fair economy overall, citing open source software within the technology sector as one example.

To do this, I begin by striking a dialectic between John Milbank's theological and David Graeber's anthropological conceptions of gift economies, illuminating crucial aspects of each to uncover what alternative economic principles are applicable to standard capitalist economic ideologies.

I then turn to a practical application of where these gift economy ideologies are already being utilized to a degree, arguing specifically that open source software provides an alternative economic logic for countless members of the technology sector. On a broad level, I hope to show that capitalism provides the means to alter itself within its own ethos, as certain economic ideologies – like gift economies – could potentially assuage those economic models that contribute to economic inequality. By accentuating these alternative logics within technology firms, they can be expanded and made more substantial, subsequently altering capitalism from the inside out.     

DESTRUCTION AND REALLOCATION OF SKILLS FOLLOWING LARGE COMPANY CLOSURES

This paper analyzes what happens to redundant skills and workers when large companies close down and whether their skills are destroyed or reallocated. The analysis is based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data of the closure of four companies. Getting a job in a skill‐related industry or moving to a spinoff firm leads to skill reallocation. Thus, the result depends on regional idiosyncrasies such as industry structure and urbanization. If local policy makers and the owners exert a coordinated effort, it is possible to create success stories of less skill destruction in urban as well as peripheral regions.     

A Bayesian Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Interaction Model: An Application to Prostate Cancer Incidence

During the past three decades, prostate cancer incidence has changed substantially in the United States. A fully Bayesian hierarchical spatio-temporal interaction model is proposed to estimate prostate cancer incidence rates in the state of Iowa. We introduce random spatial effects to capture the local dependence among regions, random temporal effects to explain the nonlinearity of rates over time, and random spatio-temporal interactions. In addition, we introduce fixed age effects because most epidemiologic data are strongly related to age. We find that prostate cancer incidence in Iowa counties increased sharply over age while incidence rates increased initially, then decreased over time. We identify hot spots of high and low rates for age groups and time periods using disease mapping.     

Franz Joseph Gall came to Copenhagen,and for a brief moment the brain was the talk of the town

ABSTRACT

When the inventor of phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall, came to Denmark in the fall of 1805, he was met with great enthusiasm and fascination among the general public, as well as within the scientific community. His visit was an event that was covered by the newspapers unlike any other scientific lecture. However, as soon as Gall left, public interest in phrenology almost instantaneously vanished. Different theories have been put forth in the attempt to answer the question as to why phrenology never found a audience in Denmark. The Danish phrenologist Carl Otto explained it by referring to the poor quality of the Danish phrenological publications. Danish historians have argued that phrenology was too incompatible with the dominant scientific paradigm, Natürphilosophie. This article argues that the newspaper coverage of phrenology was more about sensational news stories than about science, and ultimately phrenology was a fad that wore off when the newspapers shifted their focus to other news.