It is common for us to see models as exemplars of things that exist. Models, instead, are merely Peircean indexes, in that they only point to their objects, objects which may in themselves not exist. This is to say that these examples may only exist as thoughts that point to other thoughts or even ideas that point to objects that may not exist because they are paradoxical.

To attract complementary assets, firms that sponsor proprietary de facto compatibility standards must trade off control of the standard against the imperative for adoption. For example, Microsoft and Intel in turn gained pervasive adoption of their technologies by appropriating only a single layer of the standards architecture and encouraging competition in other layers. In reaction to such proprietary strategies, the open source movement relinquished control to maximize adoption. To illustrate this, we examine the rise of the Linux operating system from (...) 1995–2001, particularly the motivations of organizational buyers and suppliers of complementary assets, and Microsoft’s reaction to its success. (shrink)

In this paper I look at a specific Hebrew religious term, Tikkun Olam, to examine the manner in which it signifies differently in two specific cases. While we understand that meaning is carried in both denotation and connotation, and while a genealogy of meaning is often useful to understand the manner in which meaning has changed across time, this paper recounts the manner in which a single word may signify differently synchronically, at a single point in history.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”.) needs to be read in the light of traditional Jewish sources. The question is, how does it stand up to modern hypotheses of gender construction? Yentl was originally published in Yiddish and was translated to English in the latter half of the twentieth century. We will see that the context within which to understand the story properly is encoded in the story itself, as Umberto Eco explains in his The Role of (...) the Reader and The Limits of Interpretation. We will see how the concept of a person’s gender, as a construction by social norms, is viewed within mainstream Jewish thought. Some textual issues and contemporary ideas of gender are applied to the story. Finally, the feature film Yentl. 1983. Yentl [film]. Los Angeles: United Artists Films.) is also compared the short story on which it was based as an example of translation and re-interpretation. (shrink)

Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” by which he meant a unit of culture. Dan Dennett continued by defining a meme as a bunch of bits of information. This paper explores the “meme” and how it is semiotic, both in its technical sense and in its popular sense and explores how memes signify both in terms of classical semiotics and also in terms of post-structuralist thought.