Global Governance and the Double Movement

This article reconstructs the evolution of global governance through time, in a perspective organized around Karl Polanyi’s double movement. Starting from present-day global governance, the article reaches back in time to understand the different socially and historically contingent layers that have constituted it as a discourse and a set of practices. It argues based on the notion that global governance is a hegemonic discourse of world politics, and claims that it is so because it has become inclusive enough to accommodate both the “movement” and the “countermovement” in its cognitive and material structures. In this order of knowledge, the “healthy functioning” of the global economy always precedes the existence of prosperous societies, and comes before maintaining harmony in the ecosystem. This order sustains the active-reactive dynamics of the double movement and limits the possibilities of change in global governance.

Study on the thermal decomposition mechanism of graphene oxide functionalized with triaminoguanidine (GO-TAG) by molecular reactive dynamics and experiments

The edge carbon atoms on the GO promote the decomposition of TAG.

Skilled Bandits: Learning to Choose in a Reactive World

In uncertain environments we must balance our need to gather information with our desire to reaprewards by exploiting current knowledge. Achieving this balance is further complicated in reactiveenvironments where actions produce long-lasting change to the system. In four experiments, weinvestigate how people learn to make effective decisions from experience in a dynamic multi-armedbandit task. In contrast to the typical exploitation-dependent diminishing rewards found in previousstudies, options were framed as skills that developed greater rewards the more they were chosen. InExperiment 1, we provide a proof of concept, and in Experiments 2-4 we explore the boundaries ofparticipants’ sensitivity to reactive dynamics. Our results suggest that most individuals can learneffective strategies for coping with these reactive environments. A two-part comparison of severalcompeting psychological models supports several conclusions: 1) a sizeable minority of individualslearned that their environment was reactive, 2) several distinct groups of individuals employed uniquedecision strategies, and 3) testing models with the simulation method reveals qualitative misfits thatmotivate future theory development.