Bitcoin and the anthropology‐economics divide

A survey of the changing aspects of different disciplines—belonging to different faculties—informs us of the impact that anthropological methods, perspectives, theories, and the conclusions of their cross-cultural studies have exercised on them, which indirectly confirms the analytical strength, explanatory power, and methodological sophistication of anthropology. Notwithstanding this, the growth of anthropology in India has been both uneven and slow, a consequence of which has been the ‘interiorisation’ of anthropologists, or which T.H. Ericksen has termed ‘inward-gazing’. Contemporary anthropologists have become aware of what they have been passing through, and are striving their best to recover the past glory of their discipline when they were active participants in public debates. One of the points that this article puts forth is that anthropologists are ‘dispassionate observers’ as well as ‘citizens’. In the first role, they are committed to understanding the social and cultural processes; in the second, like any other conscientious citizen, they expect all societies and states to be just, civil, and inclusive. In the dialectics of these roles, the state of contemporary anthropology can be properly located.

Promoting Culture Change Within Organizations.

Changes in the organisation are inevitable when implementing an information system project. The information system implementation process involves the introduction of new technology, changes to business processes, and user adaptation to these changes. These changes can affect various aspects of the organisation, including structure, culture and employee behaviour. This abstract aims to analyse the changes in organisations that occur during the implementation of information systems projects. Firstly, structural changes can occur as a result of the introduction of a new information system. The organisation may need to update or change its hierarchical structure, division of tasks and communication channels to suit the needs of the new system. These changes can lead to organisational restructuring that is more efficient and responsive to technological demands. Secondly, cultural changes may occur as organisations adapt to changes in information systems. Organisational cultures accustomed to old ways of working may face resistance to change. However, through training and effective communication, organisations can build a culture that supports innovation, collaboration and adaptability. Positive cultural change is essential to ensure successful use of information systems. Thirdly, employee behaviour change is a critical component of information system implementation. Employees need to develop new skills, learn new workflows, and adapt to the changes brought about by information systems. Good training and strong management support can help reduce the uncertainty and anxiety that employees may experience during change. Employees who are able to adapt quickly and effectively will maximise the benefits of the implemented information system. In conclusion, the implementation of an information systems project brings about significant changes in the organisation. Structural, cultural and employee behavioural changes are important aspects that must be managed properly for a successful information system implementation. In the face of these changes, management must implement appropriate communication, training and support strategies to ensure good acceptance and adoption by all members of the organisation. Thus, organisational change can be an opportunity to create a more efficient, innovative and adaptive environment in the face of information technology development.

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

Fiction has come to play an essential part in human culture and life in recent centuries. Because of its importance, the language or discourse of fiction has been widely studied. Discerning the evolutionary pattern of language in fiction is greatly helpful in understanding the changes in human culture and society. However, most previous studies on literary language that made use of quantitative or computational methods restricted themselves to a few authors or groups and only took into account a relative short span of time. Furthermore, most of the quantitative analysis therein was based on a primary and rather primitive algorithm that summarizes the frequencies of linguistic units in corpora. To overcome these limitations, this study uses semantic similarity as computed by semi-supervised methods to examine diachronic changes. In this study, the three large-scale corpora representing the English language and English fiction were used to investigate the evolutionary patterns concerning diachronic concreteness/imageability. The data from the two measures are well mapped and shown to support the argument that English fiction, as a special genre, exhibits an evolutionary tendency toward increasing concreteness/imageability. This indicates that modern fiction may have become increasingly important in human society, but easier to read and process in words than 19th century English fiction. This study proposed that learnability, genre difference, the changes of population size, and the other factors might have caused the systemic change. The current study is thus an important contribution to understanding the evolutionary trend of language in fiction as well as understanding the development of the English language as a whole. This study creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes of language in literary works.

Domestication of animals was one of the most significant changes in human history, beginning with a long-term connection between hunter–gatherers and wolves more than 15,000 years ago. Between 11,000 and 4,000 years ago (approximately the Neolithic to the Bronze Age), when mixed-crop farming communities emerged, a variety of additional species, including sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, poultry, and horses, were introduced into human society. The domestication of livestock had a profound impact on human society. It allowed humans to produce more food and live in larger, more complex societies. It also led to the development of trade and commerce, as surplus animals and animal products could be exchanged for other goods. Animals have played various roles since their domestication, ranging from being tolerated to being revered in ceremonial activities to supplying humans with additional advantages, such as food, clothing, building materials, transportation, herding and hunting. The diversity of phenotypes, seen in various domesticated species has provided generations of scientists with a useful model for studying evolution. The domestication process has led to the development of many different breeds of livestock; each adapted to specific environments and tasks. In modern times, livestock domestication continues to play a significant role in food production and agriculture, and it remains an important part of many cultures worldwide.

Cooperation is crucial to overcome some of the most pressing social challenges of our times, such as the spreading of infectious diseases, corruption and environmental conservation. Yet, how cooperation emerges and persists is still a puzzle for social scientists. Since human cooperation is individually costly, cooperative attitudes should have been eliminated by natural selection in favour of selfishness. Yet, cooperation is common in human societies, so there must be some features which make it evolutionarily advantageous. Using a cognitive inspired model of human cooperation, recent work Realpe-Gómez (2018) has reported signatures of criticality in human cooperative groups. Theoretical evidence suggests that being poised at a critical point provides evolutionary advantages to groups by enhancing responsiveness of these systems to external attacks. After showing that signatures of criticality can be detected in human cooperative groups composed by Moody Conditional Cooperators, in this work we show that being poised close to a turning point enhances the fitness and make individuals more resistant to invasions by free riders.

Cooperation is crucial to overcome some of the most pressing social challenges of our times, such as the spreading of infectious diseases, corruption and environmental conservation. Yet, how cooperation emerges and persists is still a puzzle for social scientists. Since human cooperation is individually costly, cooperative attitudes should have been eliminated by natural selection in favour of selfishness. Yet, cooperation is common in human societies, so there must be some features which make it evolutionarily advantageous. Using a cognitive inspired model of human cooperation, recent work Realpe-Gómez (2018) has reported signatures of criticality in human cooperative groups. Theoretical evidence suggests that being poised at a critical point provides evolutionary advantages to groups by enhancing responsiveness of these systems to external attacks. After showing that signatures of criticality can be detected in human cooperative groups composed by Moody Conditional Cooperators, in this work we show that being poised close to a turning point enhances the fitness and make individuals more resistant to invasions by free riders.

A survey of organization in all its manifestations, in the biological organism, in animal societies (so-called), in past and present human political society and in the various groupings of human beings inside of “society” for the infinite variety of purposes for which men form associations and act together – such a survey suggests that the forms of organization may be grouped under a few main types. The first is a rigid mechanical inter-connection, as in the case of the animal body. The material system of nerves and their end-organs is familiar to all students of physiology. Recent study has shown that there is another mechanism, probably prior to the nervous system and possibly even more important in many ways, for co-ordinating the activities of the parts of the animal body. That is the circulatory system with the chemical reagents secreted in small amounts by each part and carried to other parts to produce changes in them – “hormone” action. But we are not concerned with these devices further than to notice that both are purely mechanical, and that they are neither available nor desirable as means for the organization of society, and may accordingly be dismissed. We should observe, however, that the mechanical problems of intercommunication and inter-transportation are present in human society and the manner and degree of their solution strictly limit and condition the workings of any form of organization. The difference is that in human society co-operation is and must be a conscious, intelligent response on the part of the “member,” not an automatic reaction. (The amount of physical coercion not involving “choice” of some sort by the individual is quite negligible, even the so-called use of “force” is really a manipulation of alternatives of choice.)

The sound art scene is not limited to the northern hemisphere. Rather, it is globally distributed and has for decades also appeared in various manifestations and constellations in the Global South. Globalization, postcolonialism, and decolonization are therefore issues that are just as crucial to the field of sound art as they are for other fields of social and human science. These issues are slowly beginning to enter the academic studies of sound art. However, academic interest in these issues still does not equal what we find empirically in the field. If one surfs the Internet or travels abroad to visit urban areas in the southern hemisphere, one is likely to encounter artists and communities creating works of contemporary sound art. Some of these artists involve themselves in independent long-term collaborations across the hemispheres, while others work within or supported by public institutions, but by far the majority of them are organized in local independent groups or social movements. Curators in the Global North have noted this proliferation and have, in recent years, begun to expand the repertoire of sound art by inviting artists from the Global South to perform and exhibit at cutting-edge festivals and galleries. Many of these transhemispheric collaborations have emerged from particular historical, institutional, and social contexts and take place within a growing critical awareness of postcolonial and decolonial issues. I suggest that these changes require the development of new analytical and theoretical tools within the study of sound art, tools that allow for a rewriting of the history and theory of sound art from a truly global perspective. Such a rewriting of sound art history and sound art practices will have to be acutely aware of issues of globalization, postcolonialism, and decolonialization; it will need to integrate representations on the Internet with those of live concerts, installations, and interviews; it must reach out toward anthropological and ethno-musicological methods; and it should make aesthetic considerations central to its analysis.This chapter, and this section of the book in general, is a modest attempt to begin the work of learning to pay analytical attention to these global shifts and experiments in sound art. The ambition is not to map the entire world of sound arts, nor is it to develop a new fully fledged set of methodological and theoretical tools. The intention is simply to pay attention to these global changes, and through this to start a discussion about the paradigmatic shift that is long overdue in contemporary sound art studies. (Less)

Organizational Development, Organizational Culture and Organizational Change

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is "no," then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is "yes" and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules (institutions) that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation.

SUMMARY Lines of Development of Modern Economic Theory. The economic happenings in human society are so complicated and manifold that it is not possible to establish a comprehensive theory. Theorists in economics have always been obliged, in the first place, to deduce simple processes from a few fundamental phenomena. They have to take progressively more and more phenomena into consideration in their models, if they want to provide practitioners—whether economic policy‐makers or enterprisers—with a set of instruments serving to explain the causal nexus underlying the economic phenomena of society. It is dangerous to set up a theoretical model—say, the traditional model of a market with perfect competition—as a goal for economic policy, if the said model is not accessible to genuine value judgements. Furthermore, a large group of models will not, without reservation, lend themselves to the drawing of inferences for economic policy, because, owing to the axioms upon which they are based, they are not able to show those connections in the development of the economic processus of society which are brought about by technical improvements, growth of population, changes in consumer habits, etc.While in the twenties and thirties a growing accumulation of factual material without any theoretical interpretation confronted an abundance of theoretical models without empirical substance, developments in economic theory—especially in macro‐economics—during the last fifteen years or so, and developments in practical research, as practised in, say, the U. S. A., the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, have been characterised by an effort to bridge this gap. Thus, modern theorists are trying to construct statistically testable models which will enable policy‐makers to gauge the effect of their measures with greater accuracy. National accounting and the models for analysing the interdependence of the processes of production and the connections between income, savings, consumption and investment represent attempts to fill up this gap which have, in some respects, scored a considerable success. We are by no means in sight of the end of developments in this branch of theory, especially as regards dynamic theory.The second important characteristic of the newer economic theory is the further development of market theory. Here, promising attempts are being made, through a conception of a systematic theory of economic behaviour with the aid of the theory of games, to lift economic subjects out of the state of quasi‐isolation which in traditional market theory exists, and to make it possible for morphology to be incorporated in economic theory.

An international association advancing the multidisciplinary study of informing systems. Founded in 1998, the Informing Science Institute (ISI) is a global community of academics shaping the future of informing science.

In 2006 a palisade enclosure dated to the late Middle Neolithic was excavated at Bunkeflostrand, Malmö, Sweden. The excavation of pits and wells containing flints, animal bones and pottery revealed a wide range of activities at the site, which is exceptional in comparison with most other palisade enclosures of southern Scandinavia. Palisade enclosures have emerged as places of great significance to our understanding of cultural relations traditionally associated with the transition from the Funnel Beaker culture to the Battle Axe culture. The results of the excavation at Bunkeflostrand and other palisade enclosures in the region can be used to understand social relations and cultural change in the Middle Neolithic in southern Scandinavia.