While there is growing awareness of the existence and activities of Academic Custom Writing websites, which form a small part of the contract cheating industry, how they work remains poorly understood. Very little research has been done on these sites, probably because it has been assumed that it is impossible to see behind their firewalls and password protection. We have found that, with some close scrutiny, it is indeed possible to find some ‘cracks’ in these sites through which we can (...) look to gain insights into the business processes that operate within them. We have reverse engineered the business processes that operate within some of these sites. From this we have also been able to identify three different business models that are supported by these sites. Our analysis supports important findings about how these sites operate that can be used to inform future strategies to detect and deter contract cheating. (shrink)

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas makes the claim that the unprecedented public use of critical reason was an essential constituent of the early modern European (bourgeois) public sphere (1991, 27-28, 105-6, and more generally 1-117). Narrating the history of the particular concept of critical reason that animated the public sphere, Habermas locates its origin in the practical reason (phronesis) of Aristotle but argues that Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas More had drastically transformed the concept when they substituted (...) for phronesis a practical reason based instead on techne (1973, 42, 50-51). Machiavelli's role was central in this transformation, for he "reduces the practical .. (shrink)

The atmosphere is critical to climate change. It can amplify shifts in the climate system, and also mitigate them. Giving readers an overview of key atmospheric processes, the author of this book looks at how our climate system receives energy from the sun and sheds it by emitting infrared radiation back into space. The atmosphere regulates these radiative energy flows and transports energy through weather systems such as thunderstorms, monsoons, hurricanes, and winter storms. The author explains how these processes work, (...) and also how precipitation, cloud formation, and other phase changes of water strongly influence weather and climate. He discusses how atmospheric feedbacks affect climate change, how the large-scale atmospheric circulation works, how predicting the weather and the climate are fundamentally different challenges, and much more. (shrink)

ExcerptJürgen Habermas's conception of the early modern public sphere derived in good part from a Kantian epistemology and the corollary Kantian theory of communication. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas made extended reference to Kant as the centerpiece of his crucial chapter “The Bourgeois Public Sphere: Idea and Ideology,” and the following quotation from Kant, selectively cited by Habermas, may be taken as the inspiration of Habermas's public sphere theory: Persuasion is a mere illusion; for the judgment's (...) basis, which lies in the subject, is regarded as objective. Hence such a judgment also has…. (shrink)

ExcerptIn The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the following quotation from Kant, cited in part here, underpinned Habermas's conception of the public sphere as derived from the discourse of reason: [T]he judgments of every understanding must be in agreement (consentientia uni tertio, consentiunt inter se). Thus, whether assent is conviction or mere persuasion, its touchstone externally is the possibility of communicating assent and of finding it to be valid for every human being's reason.1 This quotation included the word “judgment” (...) in close proximity to “reason,” a proximity at the heart of Kantian philosophy.2 Kant, although quite aware…. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas generally supports his theories not only by arguing for their transhistorical validity but also by demonstrating their critically reflexive understanding of their own emergence in history via a narrative of a select line of philosophers whose thought characterized their times. Habermas particularly uses such a narrative to support his conception of violence as that form of instrumental reason, increasingly pervasive in modern, rationalized societies, whereby, the actor is supposed to choose and calculate means and end from the standpoint (...) of maximizing utility or expectations of utility.... Media such as money and power attach to empirical ties;... (shrink)

‘It is remarkable that “trust” is absent from the index of many texts on the ethics of transplantation’, writes the former editor of this journal, Trevor Stammers, in the introductory chapter of hi...