Every constitution defines and is defined by a period in time. Like all law the creation and application of constitutions require reference to the past and future respectively. Every instance of constitution‐making is an attempt to control behavior over an extended period of time. Therefore constitutions will be drafted, both in style and substance, to reflect that temporal ambition. The effectiveness of a constitution also requires that its interpretation makes reference to the understanding of its rules held by the constitution‐makers. (...) As a result, and notwithstanding the efforts to make it suitable over a long period by its creators, every constitution is bound to become unsuitable. Courts employ a number of devices to cope with the inevitable obsolescence of constitutions but, sooner or later, every constitution will have to be discarded and a new constitutional era begun. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationships among Machiavellianism, attitudes towards the perceived importance of corporate ethics and social responsibility, referred to here as PRESOR attitudes, and certain attitudes toward environmental responsibility, i.e., support for corporate environmental accountability and environmentally motivated purchasing intentions, amongst undergraduate students. Data were collected from a survey of all final year undergraduate students at a university in Hong Kong. Structural equations analyses were used to investigate the associations amongst the variables. The study finds that Machiavellianism and belief (...) in the importance of CESR play important roles in the development of university students’ attitudes toward certain environmental issues. Specifically, high Machiavellian students expressed lower levels of belief in the importance of CESR, which in turn were associated with weaker pro-environment views. The findings suggest that educational efforts to cultivate students’ PRESOR attitudes and/or reduce their levels of Machiavellianism would enhance their pro-environment views. (shrink)

Isaac Newton was born on 25 December 1642 in the hamlet of Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, about six miles south of Grantham. The posthumous and only son of Isaac Newton, père, he found himself deposited with grandparents at the age of three when his mother married a second time; he remained with the grandparents for eight years until the death of his stepfather. After successfully resisting his mother's intention that he manage the considerable estate she had inherited from the two husbands, Newton (...) graduated from the grammar school in Grantham and enrolled in Trinity College, Cambridge, in June 1661. Trinity was Newton's home for the following 35 years. He received his B.A. in 1665 and his M.A. three years later. Meanwhile he had been elected to a fellowship in the college, and in 1669, upon the resignation of Isaac Barrow, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Newton did not strain himself with teaching. During his nearly 30 years as a fellow of Trinity he tutored only three students, all of them wealthy fellow commoners; he formed no perceptible bond with any of them. As Lucasian Professor, he lectured once a week during one term each year, at least early in his tenure. There is testimony that frequently no one attended the lectures, and even later, when he was famous and a connection with him was potentially valuable, only two men claimed to have heard them. He ceased to lecture altogether after 1687, and may have stopped before that. (shrink)

Taking Isaac Newton at his own word, historians have long agreed that the decade of the 1660s, when Newton was a young man in his twenties, was the critical period in his scientific career. In the years 1665 and 1666, he has told us, he hit on the ideas of cosmic gravitation, the composition of white light, and the fluxional calculus. The elaboration of these basic ideas constituted his scientific achievement. Nevertheless, the decade of the 1660s has remained a virtual (...) blank in our knowledge of Newton. It need not remain so always. His papers contain a wealth of manuscripts from his undergraduate years and the period immediately following. The first volume of his mathematical papers, which will soon be published, will demonstrate how extensive the information on his early mathematical development is. The development of his non-mathematical studies, especially of what I shall call his scientific studies to distinguish them from the mathematical, can be followed as well—in his reading notes, in his notebooks, above all in the passage in his philosophical notebook labelled Quaestiones quaedam Philosophicae. In this passage we see emerging into consciousness for the first time the questions on which Newton's philosophy of nature was built. (shrink)