Consumer behaviour in restructured electricity markets

With many electricity markets around the world now open to retail competition, it is increasingly valuable to understand the attitudes, motivations and behaviour of residential electricity purchasers. Drawing upon two sets of survey results from an Ontario (Canada) community, this paper answers two questions. First, what ‘kinds’ of people are more or less likely to switch electricity supplier? Secondly, what motivates those who are more or less likely to switch electricity supplier? After answering these questions, the paper advances marketing strategies for new retail electricity suppliers and proposes business plans for established municipal electric utilities. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications Ltd.     

Psychological Distress Reported by Patients Undergoing Limb Reconstruction Surgery: Implications for Psychological Interventions

Limb reconstruction is an orthopaedic surgical technique designed to restore or improve functioning and appearance. The aims of the present study were to investigate levels of psychological distress in adults undergoing limb reconstruction as a result of traumatic injury, to examine which variables could account for any variations in distress during and after treatment, and to ascertain the potential relevance of psychological interventions. A cross-sectional sample of patients completed measures of psychological distress, posttraumatic symptomatology, coping, social support, pain, and disability. Self-reported levels of psychological distress and posttraumatic symptoms were high but did not tend to vary across stage of treatment, suggesting that distress is not solely attributable to limb reconstruction treatment per se but to other factors. Both medical variables (pain and mobility) and psychological variables (symptoms of trauma and coping strategies) accounted for a significant percentage of the variance in HAD scores. These results suggest that both medical and psychological interventions have potential for reducing distress and increasing well-being in an orthopaedic population who are experiencing high levels of emotional distress.     

THE EXTENDED MIND

The extended mind is the thesis that some mental—typically cognitive—processes are partly composed of operations performed by cognizing organisms on the world around them. The operations in question are ones of manipulation, transformation, or exploitation of environmental structures. And the structures in question are ones that carry information pertinent to the success or efficacy of the cognitive process in question. This essay examines the thesis of the extended mind and evaluates the arguments for and against it.     

Understanding the ‘active’ in ‘enactive’

Much recent work on cognition is characterized by an augmentation of the role of action coupled with an attenuation of the role of representation. This coupling is no accident. The appeal to action is seen either as a way of explaining representation or explaining it away. This paper argues that the appeal to action as a way of explaining, supplementing, or even supplanting, representation can lead to a serious dilemma. On the one hand, the concept of action to which we appeal cannot, on pain of circularity, be a representational concept. Such an appeal would presuppose representation and therefore can neither explain it nor explain it away. On the other hand, I shall argue, if the concept of action to which we appeal is not a representational one, there is every reason for supposing that it will not be the sort of thing that can explain, or supplement, let alone supplant, representation. The resulting dilemma, I shall argue, is not fatal. But avoiding it requires us to embrace a certain thesis about the nature of action, a thesis whose broad outline this paper delineates. Anyone who wishes to employ action as a way of explaining or explaining away representation should, I shall argue, take this conception of action very seriously indeed. I am going to discuss these issues with respect to a influential recent contribution to this debate: the sensorimotor or enactive model of perception developed by Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë.     

Contractarianism and Animal Rights

It is widely accepted, by both friends and foes of animal rights, that contractarianism is the moral theory least likely to justify the assigning of direct moral status to non-human animals. These are not, it is generally supposed, rational agents, and contractarian approaches can grant direct moral status only to such agents. I shall argue that this widely accepted view is false. At least some forms of contractarianism, when properly understood, do, in fact, entail that non-human animals possess direct moral status, independently of their utility for rational agents, and independently of whatever interests rational agents may have in them. The version of contractarianism I shall focus upon is that defended by John Rawls.