Spectral Strangers: Charlotte Brontë’s teachers

Abstract

In this article I attempt to engage with Charlotte Brontë as both a teacher and a philosopher. In her depiction of two impoverished gentlewomen as teachers Brontë is, as is often pointed out, drawing on her own history, but she is also exploring two conflicting contemporary philosophic notions: the romantic ideal and the ideal of rationality, as they are played out in the lives of women. Brontë uses the plot device of taking her teachers into new environments, from where as strangers they can report to the reader on the conditions they experience. But the teachers are also strangers in the teaching environments of their employment and, moreover, as individuals are stripped of all familial and social support. While her pedagogic strategies may not be appealing to twentieth century tastes, Brontë and her creations still have something to say about the issues, choices and constraints faced by young and inexperienced teachers, and the available subject-positions teachers may construct for themselves as they grapple with their own foreignness in their classrooms or other teaching situations.     

Substitutability and complementarity of technological knowledge and the inventive performance of semiconductor companies

This paper analyses whether complementarity and substitutability of knowledge elements are key determinants of the firm's inventive performance, in addition to the more conventional measures of knowledge stock and diversity. Using patent data from 1968 to 2002 in the semiconductor industry, we find that the overall level of complementarity between knowledge components positively contributes to firms’ inventive capability, whereas the overall level of substitutability between knowledge components generally has the opposite effect. Yet a relatively high level of substitutability is found to be beneficial for explorative inventions. These results suggest that a firm's inventive capacity significantly depends on its ability to align its inventive strategies and knowledge base structure.     

Inventors and invention processes in Europe: Results from the PatVal-EU survey

Based on a survey of the inventors of 9017 European patented inventions, this paper provides new information about the characteristics of European inventors, the sources of their knowledge, the importance of formal and informal collaborations, the motivations to invent, and the actual use and economic value of the patents.     

Towards a philosophy of academic publishing

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper is the result of a collective writing process.     

The Missing Link: Context Loss in Online Databases

Full-text databases do not allow for the complexity of the interaction of the human eye and brain with printed matter. As a result, both content and context may be lost. The authors propose additional indexing fields that would maintain the content and context of print in electronic formats.