Recent years have seen a proliferation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with a mission to help redress various social and environmental problems, but the effectiveness of these organisations in carrying out their stated goals is rarely assessed or critically examined. It has become increasingly clear, however, that these organisations vary greatly in their level of competence and professionalism. Many of them are ineffective, and in some cases they may even exacerbate the problems they set out to solve. These difficulties are based upon flawed assumptions about how civil society can correct social ills, and about how institutions that are intermediate between the individual and the state can carry out effective change. To illustrate these points with an environmental example, we present the case of Jamaica's coral reefs, which have been under stress for decades. Both the causes of reef degradation and the solutions to these problems can be clearly outlined. Many well-intentioned organisations and individuals have been involved in the attempt to stem or reverse the damage, and significant funding has been channelled through these agencies. In spite of this, there has been no documented improvement in the condition of the reefs, apart from some natural regeneration that owed nothing whatever to any human activity. The problem is that the known solutions have not been implemented. This has happened for several reasons. First, government organisations have actively encouraged NGOs to undertake the responsibility of protecting sections of the coastline, but without any proper assessment of the capacity of those organisations to do so, and in some cases actively preventing them from acquiring that capacity. Second, the proliferation of NGOs (in part a response to the availability of funding) has been counter-effective, resulting in duplication of effort, competition for limited funds, and conscious or unconscious misrepresentation of results. Third, the utilisation of NGOs to solve environmental problems often results in an increase in the number of levels of management, resulting in inefficient utilisation of funds. The known solutions to the degradation in the Jamaican marine environment principally involve (a) reducing fishing pressures at a national level and (b) the reduction of pollution by local municipalities. The effective role of NGOs in bringing about these two solutions therefore differs: where national changes are necessary, government centralisation and effective enforcement are necessary, although NGOs could still play a useful auxiliary or augmenting role. With local problems like municipal pollution, NGOs may be better able to lead in catalysing and implementing change, although the government could usefully provide co-ordination and support. These differences illustrate the fallacy in the simplistic assumption that rising public concern, increased levels of funding and a growing number of people and/or organisations involved in conservation will lead to environmental improvement. Effective hierarchical organisation is still a prerequisite for bringing about effective solutions, although the mode of organisation adopted should be a function of the particular solution necessary. Finally, since many NGOs have effectively functioned as parasitical organisations that have consumed public funding without any discernible public benefit, NGOs should be subject to the same scrutiny and assessment as any private sector organisation contracted to the government and/or donor agencies, and those who fail to perform should be barred from further receipt of public funds.

The current president, George W. Bush, may be linguistically atypical of educated speakers in some ways, but he shares one grammatical trait with many others, namely, the nonstandard syntactic construction we will call provisionally, for lack of a better designation, the reduplicative copula, as in the following examples: "What I've said is is that. . ." (televised debate with Al Gore, 3 Oct. 2000); and even more incongruously, "My concerns are is that. . ." (Vermont Public Radio, interview at Burlington Airport, 23 Oct. 1999). The second construction we have not observed in any other speaker, but the first is quite commonly heard, as in: "What I can say is is that. . ." (Greg Maffei, Microsoft CFO, interviewed on CNN's Moneyline, 10 Nov. 1999); "The truth is is that. . ." (Ira Glasser, ACLU director, interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition, 27 Dec. 2000); "The secret truth was is that work was my whole life" (character on the ABC soap opera Once and Again, 9 Nov. 2001); and "The good news is is that. . ." (Paula Dobriansky, under secretary of state for global affairs, interviewed on CNN's America's New War, 30 Nov. 2001). Examples such as these could be multiplied manyfold, as this is a widespread feature of contemporary speech (if absent from written English). As far as we can determine, this syntactic phenomenon, particularly with sentence topic words like problem, was first discussed in print in Shapiro (1993, 12), 1 where the example cited was uttered by Hillary Clinton: "The ratio is is that. . ." (excerpt from a speech to the American Hospital Association, CNN's Early Prime news broadcast, 9 Aug. 1993). Shapiro wondered whether the duplication could be some kind of emphasis or a hesitation phenomenon, "a vagary of performance, where the speaker isn't sure what they will assert in the rest of the sentence," and ventured the following commentary (which he no longer finds completely explanatory): Perhaps we should regard it as a pleonasm, which, of course, is a kind of repetition. But the advantage of changing perspectives becomes clear when we also adopt the corollary position of interpreting copula reduplication as a concomitant of a boundary shift.. .. Perhaps what we have here is the linearization of the redundant existential meaning that inheres in the simultaneous semantic syntagm of every topic word. The nouns problem, reason, and guess [in topic position] contain within their syntagms of signata the meaning of existing-albeit redundantly. The nonstandard construction X is is that Y can be interpreted as being the product of the

We present several existential-like graphs and models of the ontological links found along a continuum from physiosemiosis to anthroposemiosis. Our models derive from our rereading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theories of the symbol and of his notion of the ''outness'' of mind in terms of Charles Sanders Peirce's ''semeiotic,'' a rereading by which we introduce an ecocritical and pansemiotic mode of literary ecology called Renewable Historicism and argue for a new, distributed understanding of intentionality, one that connects the self-organization of rocks in the lithosphere to that phenomenon whereby inanimate objects (such as rocks) get themselves transformed into human objectives.

At common law, and whether or not there is default on the part of the debtor, the legal mortgagee enjoys the proprietary right to take actual possession of mortgaged property for any purpose: ‘… before the ink is dry on the mortgage.’ Although technically this is an absolute right, in practice possession will be sought only if the borrower is in breach of the mortgage agreement. The danger remains, however, that such an unqualified right may be arbitrarily used by a capricious mortgagee. Any minor and temporary default might be seized upon by the lender as justification for taking possession and, subsequently, selling the property. This would deprive the mortgagor of any opportunity to remedy the default. The lender could, thereby, render the borrower homeless simply to rid itself of the inconvenience of a problem debtor.

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