Before WW2 Danish geologists had found traces of uranium in Greenland. But being squeezed from both sides in the escalating Cold War between East and West, in the first decade after WW2 the Danish government did not support expeditions to explore Greenland's potential uranium deposits. The situation changed abruptly after President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace address in December 1953, as a result of which a Danish Atomic Energy Commission (AEK) was set up in early 1955. Besides building a (...) large atomic energy research facility (Risø) one of AEK's first initiatives was to support big scale uranium expeditions to South-West Greenland. The ultimate goal for the leaders of AEK was to liberate Denmark from its dependence on imported fossil fuels by developing Danish nuclear reactors, fuelled by natural uranium from Greenland. In the late 1960s, after more than a decade of uranium explorations, this was still a goal, albeit much more long term. For many reasons the hunt for uranium in Greenland after WW2 was unsuccessful, but the main ones were Danish sovereignty concerns, techno-scientific nationalism and devastating institutional clashes of interests. The present paper will explore these problems. (shrink)

The ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of knowledge circulation is explored in a study of the encounter between American and British nuclear scientists and engineers who together developed a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium in the 1960s. A fine-grained analysis of the transnational encounter reveals that the ‘how’ engages a wide variety of sometimes mundane modes of exchange in a series of face-to-face interactions over several years. The ‘why’ is driven by the reciprocal wish to improve the performance of the (...) centrifuge, though this motive is embedded in the asymmetric field of the ‘special relationship’ in nuclear matters between the United Kingdom and the United States. The result of the encounter is co-produced, hybrid knowledge in which the national provenance of the contributions from each side of the Atlantic is at once diluted and a contested site for the affirmation of national power. (shrink)

In the ever-expanding field of nuclear history, studies of ‘nuclear culture’ are becoming increasingly popular. Often situated within national contexts, they typically explore responses to the nuclear condition in the cultural modes of literature, art, music, theatre, film and other media, as well as nuclear imagery more generally. This paper offers a critique of current conceptions of ‘nuclear culture’, and argues that the term has little analytical coherence. It suggests that historians of ‘nuclear culture’ have tended to essentialize the nuclear (...) to the detriment of historical analysis, and that the wide variety of methodological approaches to ‘nuclear culture’ are simultaneously a strength and a more significant weakness, in that they have little shared sense of the meaning of the term, its theoretical underpinnings or its analytical purchase. The paper then offers a study of Ewan MacColl's 1946 playUranium 235, whose career reveals much about the diversity of cultures of the nuclear in post-war Britain. The study moves us away from a single, homogeneous ‘British nuclear culture’ towards a pluralistic critical history of cultural responses to nuclearization. These responses, I conclude, should be seen as collectively constitutive of the nuclear condition rather than as passive reflections of it. (shrink)

Though grassroots organizations have mobilized against US environmental injustices since; the 1980s, academic definitions of environmental justice (EJ) remain limited in important ways, including: a tendency to privilege cases where activists achieve a successful, ‘tidy’ outcome; inattention to roles natural resource dependence and free market systems play in structuring environmental inequality; and a tendency to under-analyze alternative notions of EJ that result, utilized by activists who prioritize local autonomy and procedural justice in land-use decision making. Here, I argue that these (...) alternative notions of EJ help mobilize divergent forms of EJ activism-‘sites of resistance’ to industrial production systems and their risks, and ‘sites of acceptance’ to those same practices. To illustrate, I explore extensive mixed method data in the context of energy development and sites of acceptance related to uranium production in the southwestern United States. I show how alternative notions of EJ are shaped by identification with uranium production, persistent poverty and economic insecurity, and faith that increased uranium production will fuel US nuclear power production and help combat global climate change. (shrink)

The hydrogen economy has received increasing attention recently. Common reasons cited for investigating hydrogen energy options are improved energy security, reduced environmental impacts, and its contribution to a transition to sustainable energy sources. In anticipation of these benefits, national and local initiatives have been launched in the United States, creating pilot “roadmaps” and technology partnerships to explore hydrogen economy platforms. Although hydrogen can provide several positive improvements over a carbon- or uranium-based energy system, several problems are also likely. As (...) well, competitive technologies (e.g., hybrid vehicles) may offer comparatively greater economic and/or environmental advantages. Before policies to advance a hydrogen energy economy proceed, it is vital that all aspects of hydrogen be compared with other available alternatives. Important questions to ask in this regard are whether a hydrogen economy can fulfill key energy needs and whether there are appropriate roles for hydrogen to play in a sustainable energy future. (shrink)

Peter Goldie opens the path to a deeper understanding of our emotional lives through a lucid philosophical exploration of this surprisingly neglected topic. Drawing on philosophy, literature and science, Goldie considers the roles of culture and evolution in the development of our emotional capabilities. He examines the links between emotion, mood, and character, and places the emotions in the context of consciousness, thought, feeling, and imagination. He explains how it is that we are able to make sense of our (...) own and other people's emotions, and how we can explain the very human things which emotions lead us to do. He argues that it is only from the personal point of view that thoughts, reasons, feelings, and actions come into view. This fascinating book gives an accessible but penetrating exploration of an important but mysterious subject. Any reader interested in emotion and its role in understanding our lives will find much to think about here. (shrink)

Remembering and forgetting are the two poles of the memory system. Consequently, any approach to memory should be able to explain both remembering and forgetting in order to gain a comprehensive and insightful understanding of the memory system. Can an enactive approach to memory processes do so? In this article I propose a possible way to provide a positive answer to this question. In line with some current enactive approaches to memory, I suggest that forgetting –similarly to remembering– might be (...) constituted within an embodied and active process. Within this process, some simulation and re-enactment paths would acquire more relevance than others. This acquired relevance would make the activation of other paths of recall less likely, thus preventing the memory system from engaging in some episodic simulations. These changes in the likelihood of activation of some paths of recall –the forgotten ones– can be accounted for in an enactive fashion by studying both “internal” and “external” re-enactment and simulation paths. With regard to the latter, I propose to examine the process of forgetting by considering the engagement and affective relation of an embodied agent with her field of affordances. I suggest that, in the case of emotion-laden memories, the agent’s decoupling from some affordances of the environment might contribute to the process of forgetting, in that it would reduce the agent’s opportunities for situated episodic simulations. (shrink)

Venturing into novel terrain poses physical risks to a female and her offspring. Females have a greater tendency to avoid physical harm, while males tend to have larger range sizes and often outperform females in navigation-related tasks. Given this backdrop, we expected that females would explore a novel environment with more caution than males, and that more-cautious exploration would negatively affect navigation performance. Participants explored a novel, large-scale, virtual environment in search of five objects, pointed in the direction of (...) each object from the origin, and then navigated back to the objects. We found that females demonstrated more caution while exploring as reflected in the increased amounts of pausing and revisiting of previously traversed locations. In addition, more pausing and revisiting behaviors led to degradation in navigation performance. Finally, individual levels of trait harm avoidance were positively associated with the amount of revisiting behavior during exploration. These findings support the idea that the fitness costs associated with long-distance travel may encourage females to take a more cautious approach to spatial exploration, and that this caution may partially explain the sex differences in navigation performance. (shrink)

Résumé Dans les situations sociomotrices, l’engagement des participants n’est pas seulement réductible aux communications directes. Il est surtout lié à l’émergence de systèmes de signes assurant la dynamique globale du jeu. Nous proposons d’appréhender la communication comme un système d’interaction global constitué de plusieurs canaux. On y retrouve les communications directes mais aussi quatre systèmes de signes : celui des praxèmes, des gestèmes, des gestes et des communications verbales. Ce travail interroge la place de chaque canal communicationnel dans deux sports (...) et deux jeux traditionnels. Nous recrutons trois groupes de 20 étudiants pour participer aux jeux mentionnés. Les communications sont filmées, décryptées, triées et catégorisées. On constate une forte prévalence des praxèmes dans les sports collectifs, tandis que la répartition des communications est plus équilibrée dans les jeux traditionnels. La quantité, la variabilité et l’organisation des signes sont sensibles à la logique interne. Globalement, cette recherche tend à montrer que les jeux sont un formidable laboratoire in vivo pour comprendre l’organisation des systèmes de signes. Spécifiquement, elle apporte des informations sur le pouvoir socialisant de la sémiotricité de chaque jeu et sur le renouvellement des pédagogies qu’elle peut engendrer. (shrink)

This important new book by one of the world's leading political theorists boldly questions the moral justification for organizing our world as a territorial states-system and proposes major changes to states' sovereign powers.

This essay attempts to give definitions and identity conditions for the two predominant senses of ‘Argument’ currently in use, the one involving reasons for a conclusion and the other denoting an expressed disagreement with ensuing verbal behaviour by two parties. I see Johnson's new concept of ‘Argument’, as developed in his book Manifest Rationality, as a hybrid of the two common senses of ‘Argument’, and, accordingly, I try to define and give the identity conditions of Johnson-arguments. Finally, I disagree with (...) Johnson on the nature of the definition he thinks he has proposed, and I conclude with observations suggesting that his logical perspective has dialectical and rhetorical components. (shrink)

A crucial question here is what, exactly, the conditional in the naive truth/set comprehension principles is. In 'Logic of Paradox', I outlined two options. One is to take it to be the material conditional of the extensional paraconsistent logic LP. Call this "Strategy 1". LP is a relatively weak logic, however. In particular, the material conditional does not detach. The other strategy is to take it to be some detachable conditional. Call this "Strategy 2". The aim of the present essay (...) is to investigate Stragey 1. It is not to advocate it. The work is simply an extended exploration of the strategy, its strengths, its weaknesses, and the various dierent ways in which it may be implemented. In the first part of the paper I will set up the appropriate background details. In the second, I will look at the strategy as it applies to the semantic paradoxes. In the third I will look at how it applies to the set-theoretic paradoxes. (shrink)

Narrative and exploration: toward a poetics of knowledge in nursingThe dualism of subject and object has been a traditional model for nursing knowledge. That model is portrayed here as an epistemological exile. Our self‐imposed exile from the lived world of nursing can be remedied by inquiry based on engagement rather than distance. One model for engaged inquiry is explorers'journeys in remote regions. Knowledge of a region can be local or colonial, according to the explorer's stake in the region as (...) homeland or territory. Nursing is an existential region where people live. In the exploration of nursing as homeland, knowledge takes the form of local narrative, the story of a place told by its inhabitants. Narrative inquiry offers nursing an epistemology that is both ethically and aesthetically congruent with its practice of engagement. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Jahrgang: 2013 Heft: 197 Seiten: 171-201.

This book aims to contribute significantly to the understanding of issues of value which repeatedly emerge in interdisciplinary discussions on space and society. Although a recurring feature of discussions about space in the humanities, the treatment of value questions has tended to be patchy, of uneven quality and even, on occasion, idiosyncratic rather than drawing upon a close familiarity with state-of-the-art ethical theory. One of the volume's aims is to promote a more robust and theoretically informed approach to the ethical (...) dimension of discussions on space and society. While the contributions are written in a manner which is accessible across disciplines, the book still withstands scrutiny by those whose work is primarily on ethics. At the same time it allows academics across a range of disciplines an insight into current approaches toward how the work of ethics gets done. The issues of value raised could be used to inform debates about regulation, space law and protocols for microbial discovery as well as longer-range policy debates about funding. (shrink)

This article will study a class of deduction systems that allow for a limited use of the modus ponens method of deduction. We will show that it is possible to devise axiom systems α that can recognize their consistency under a deduction system D provided that: (1) α treats multiplication as a 3-way relation (rather than as a total function), and that (2) D does not allow for the use of a modus ponens methodology above essentially the levels of Π1 (...) and Σ1 formulae. Part of what will make this boundary-case exception to the Second Incompleteness Theorem interesting is that we will also characterize generalizations of the Second Incompleteness Theorem that take force when we only slightly weaken the assumptions of our boundary-case exceptions in any of several further directions. (shrink)

We examined the associations between the characteristics of Instagram users and the features of their photographs. Narcissism, life satisfaction, and loneliness were employed for user variables and the features at high- and low-levels were employed to analyze the Instagram photographs. An online survey was conducted with 179 university students, and their Instagram photographs, 25,394 in total, were collected and analyzed. High-level features were extracted using Computer Vision and Emotion Application Programming Interfaces in Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, and low-level features were (...) extracted utilizing the program written by the authors. The results of correlation analysis indicate that narcissism, life satisfaction, and loneliness were significantly associated with a part of photograph features at high- and low-levels. The results of the predictive analysis suggest that narcissism, loneliness in total, and social loneliness could be predicted with acceptable accuracy from Instagram photograph features, while characteristics such as life satisfaction, family loneliness, and romantic loneliness could not be predicted. Implications of this research and suggestions for further research were presented. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine whether patient/client autonomy is always compatible with the nurse’s role of advocacy. The author looks separately at the concepts of autonomy and advocacy, and considers them in relation to the reality of clinical practice from professional, ethical and legal perspectives. Considerable ambiguity is found regarding the legitimacy of claims of a unique function for nurses to act as patient advocates. To act as an advocate may put nurses at personal and professional risk. (...) It may also be deemed arrogant and insulting to other health care professionals. Patient autonomy can be seen as a subcategory of the right of every individual to self-determination, and as such is protected by law. However, it is questionable whether the traditionally paternalistic approach to health care provision truly respects the autonomous rights of each patient. The author considers examples and cases from the literature that resulted in professional and/or personal difficulties for the nurses involved, and also reflects on an incident from her own practice where a positive outcome was achieved that demonstrated compatibility between the concepts under consideration. (shrink)

Bringing the views of Grayling, Moyal-Sharrock and Stroll together, I argue that in On Certainty, Wittgenstein explores the possibility of a new kind of foundationalism. Distinguishing propositional language-games from non-propositional, actional certainty, Wittgenstein investigates a foundationalism sui generis . Although he does not forthrightly state, defend, or endorse what I am characterizing as a "new kind of foundationalism," we must bear in mind that On Certainty was a collection of first draft notes written at the end of Wittgenstein's life. The (...) work was unprogrammatic, sometimes cryptic. Yet, his exploration into areas of knowledge, certitude and doubt suggest an identifiable direction to his thoughts. (shrink)

A growing body of literature places blame for accounting frauds on the failure of educators to implement ethics training in accounting curriculums in higher educational institutions. Although, the professional accountancy bodies in the UK espouse high ethical standards, others suggest that these bodies are failing to cover ethics in any meaningful way. This study surveys faculty about what is being taught and how much time is dedicated to ethics training. This is the first study to examine whether content suggested by (...) the Ethics Education Framework has been implemented in curriculums in the UK. In addition, we look to determine if there is a notable difference between what is covered in both pre-1992 and post-1992 UK universities. Although we find that post-1992 institutions have implemented the EEF suggestions more than pre-1992 UK universities, current ethics training is insufficient and has not changed much over the last two decades. (shrink)

Past research has suggested that those spontaneous movements of the human hand made during talk convey significant semantic information over and above the speech, at least when the unit of speech analyzed is the individual clause. However, no previous research has tested whether this information is represented linguistically elsewhere in the narrative . The first study, reported here, uses an experimental procedure to identify which specific imagistic gestures add semantic information to the speech. The second study analyzes whether the specific (...) gestures still do this when respondents hear the whole narrative. It was found that two thirds of the semantic information, thought to be carried by the gestures, is, in fact, represented in the linguistic discourse, or is inferable from it. However, one third of the additional semantic information contained in the gestures is not represented linguistically in the narrative nor is it inferable from it. In other words, a proportion of the imagistic gestures that accompany speech are absolutely critical to semantic communication. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe role of exemplification and exemplars is receiving increasing attention in educational theory. Usually, this is connected to emulation models in character and moral education. Exemplars in this framework are those who show us how to act and what to do, and inspire us emotionally to improve. In Hannah Arendt’s unfinished work on judgement, the exemplar plays a different role. Instead of functioning as an inspiration for behavioural change, the exemplar inspires thinking. In Men in Dark Times and the lecture (...) series ‘Some questions of moral philosophy’, we find a collection of texts describing in detail some of the intellectual inspirations for Arendt’s work on exemplarity and judgement. In this paper, I will use an exploration of these texts as a starting point for considering the role of exemplarity in the development of educational judgement. (shrink)

Vision, more than any other sense, dominates our mental life. Our visual experience is just so rich, so detailed, that we can hardly distinguish that experience from the world itself. Even when we just think about the world and don't look at it directly, we can't help but 'imagine' what it looks like. We think of 'seeing' as being a conscious activity--we direct our eyes, we choose what we look at, we register what we are seeing. The series of events (...) described in this book radically altered this attitude towards vision. This book describes one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on consciousness. It is the story of Dee Fletcher--a woman recently blinded--who became the subject of a series of scientific studies. As events unfolded, Milner and Goodale found that Dee wasn't in fact blind--she just didn't know that she could see. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, the two scientists who made this incredible discovery tell the amazing story of their work, and the surprising conclusion they were forced to reach. Written to be accessible to students and popular science readers, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind. (shrink)

This paper addresses the challenge of ethically integrating ChatGPT, a sophisticated AI language model, into K-14 economics education. Amidst the growing presence of AI in classrooms, it proposes the “Evaluate, Reflect, Assurance” model, a novel decision-making framework grounded in normative and virtue ethics, to guide educators. This approach is detailed through a theoretical decision tree, offering educators a heuristic tool to weigh the educational advantages and ethical dimensions of using ChatGPT. An educator can use the decision tree to reach a (...) conclusion on using ChatGPT within the classroom environment by using ethical considerations to promote personalized learning and upholding academic integrity. The paper stresses the importance of ongoing professional development for educators in ethical AI usage and calls for institutional support in this pursuit. It also identifies future research directions, including long-term impact studies of ChatGPT and comparative analyses of various AI tools in economics education, underscoring the paper’s relevance to current educational technology discourse. (shrink)

Coping is customarily understood as those thoughts and actions humans adopt while undergoing situations appraised as threatening and stressful, or when peo- ple’s sense of who they are and what they should do is significantly challenged. In these cases, coping thoughts and actions help one endure and hopefully overcome these stresses, threats, and/or challenges. Discussions of coping are common among psychologists, but nearly absent from the philosophical literature despite their importance in theories of agency and for closely related concepts like (...) resili- ence. Building from psychological theories of coping, I offer a first philosophical exploration of the concept by showing how it can relate to and enrich extant work on agency and resilience and contribute to a more nuanced account of agency itself, especially as exercised in less-than-ideal conditions. (shrink)

The concept of metaphysical grounding refers to a dependence relation—a relation between facts that is asymmetrical and non-causal. I aim to apply this concept to a Divine Command Theory (DCT) of moral obligations. Divine command theorists say that moral obligations arise from God’s commands. I argue that the three main views on the relation between the divine command and the obligation—causal, supervenience, and identity—do not capture all that we desire in a moral theory of obligations. After attempting to clarify metaphysical (...) grounding in general, I articulate the distinction between what I call normative grounding and metaethical grounding. I then use this distinction to criticize Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s discussion of DCT and to highlight the compatibility of DCT with other ethical theories. (shrink)

H5N1 avian influenza has reportedly claimed the lives of 186 persons worldwide, 77 of whom resided in Indonesia. On February 7, 2007, the government of Indonesia announced that it would withhold strains of H5N1 avian influenza virus from the World Health Organization. On the same day, Indonesia signed a memorandum of agreement with Baxter Healthcare, a United States-based company, to purchase samples and presumably ensure access to subsequent vaccines at a discount.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Taking Up Space:Museum Exploration in the Twenty-First CenturyTiffany Sutton (bio)Museums have become a crucible for questions of the role that traditional art and art history should play in contemporary art. Friedrich Nietzsche argued in the nineteenth century that museums can be no more than mausoleums for effete (fine) art.1 Over the course of the twentieth century, however, curators dispelled such blanket pessimism by showing that what keeps historical (...) art museums, both comprehensive and modern, "alive" and relevant in the modern art world are the things that curators do with the artworks in their collections.2 In certain cases, I will argue in this article, the focus on artworks and the relationship between them can be rewardingly shifted onto the spatial aspect of the museum. I will try to show what such a shift of focus entails, show that it involves a gestalt shift (in Wittgenstein's terms, the "dawning of an aspect"), and illustrate the limits within which this can arise.3 The foremost of these limiting factors is museum architecture, and I will discuss this to the extent that it determines the limits of what curators can do. How architects do things with museums, however, lies outside the scope of this article.An Art Historical Heuristic Gets a Curatorial MakeoverNineteenth-century art museums typically were vast, labyrinthine, and built to assume the shape of a comprehensive art historical narrative, so they were easy targets for ideologues drawn to vibrant modern artworks and the controversy surrounding them. At the turn of the twentieth century new commercial galleries developed a distinctively modern mode of display in which individual artworks were showcased with plenty of space around them.4 Had existing museums changed their ways to accommodate these developments, the momentum of a new aesthetic of flatness, surface, [End Page 87] and yet purer forms of conceptualism would have been lost. It was not a time for absorption and deflation: new museums, no less monumental and historical but smaller and with fewer volumes, were commissioned to give modern art the appearance of a fresh start.5 The weightless upward mobility of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, modeled in 1945 and opened to the public in 1959, consummated this trend of the first half of the twentieth century and gave it its purest form. What the building spurt revealed was that as art changes, it demands to be reflected in its surroundings, not merely accommodated. That the response was to build new museums rather than new wings suggests the inner workings of the principle—call it "curatorial heuristic one"—that, whereas art history is fluid and simply flows forward with new developments, museums are not of this nature; they can become effete.The curatorial revision of this heuristic was a century in coming. As often happens when emerging movements are yet underdetermined, modernism suppressed in its beginnings the background factor that would seem to entail the end of modern art when finally brought into focus: the very context of display that had once set it apart. Duchamp's Readymades (1913) gave the initial nod (or wink) to the gallery context; it was, however, ignored, as a suppressed punch line, until art history was ready to concede the importance of the context of display—not in the gallery, but in the museum—to a site-specific artwork by Richard Serra: his Splashing and Prop (1968). With the museum's framing context and, concomitantly, the importance of the curator's work conceded, the barrier that had kept lesser masterpieces in the basement (or out of the museum) were removed. Unearthed, these began to circulate, and attention centered on the relation in which they stood to better-known artworks, either as suppressed alternates or as descendants of an artistic lineage. So postmodern sprawl began, with the display of multiple alternative art histories drawing, as modernism had, on available display conventions for periodizing according to internal principles (period, school, genre, style) such that detection of them devolved upon the viewer.When public uses for the new public museums began to diversify (from an historical/educational focus to aesthetic/educational and cultural/political ones), principles for ordering artworks were... (shrink)

The moral obligation to support space exploration follows from our obligations to protect the environment and to survive as a species. It can be justified through three related arguments: one supporting space exploration as necessary for acquiring resources, and two illustrating the need for space technology in order to combat extraterrestrial threats such as meteorite impacts. Three sorts of objections have been raised against this obligation. The first are objections alleging that supporting space exploration is impractical. The (...) second is the widely held notion that space exploration and environmentalism are at odds with one another. Finally, there are two objections to using space resources that Robert Sparrow has raised on the topic of terraforming. The obligation to support space exploration can be defended in at least three ways: (1) the "argument from resources," that space exploration is useful for amplifying our available resources; (2) the "argument from asteroids," that space exploration is necessary for protecting the environment and its inhabitants from extraterrestrial threats such as meteorite impacts; and (3) the "argument from solar burnout," that we are obligated to pursue interstellar colonization in order to ensure long-term human survival. (shrink)

Since the time of Hippocrates, madness has typically been viewed through the lens of disease, dysfunction, and defect. In 'Madness', philosopher of science Justin Garson presents a radically different paradigm for conceiving of madness and the forms that it takes. In this paradigm, which he calls madness-as-strategy, madness is neither a disease nor a defect, but a designed feature, like the heart or lungs.

The website Rotten Tomatoes, located at www.rottentomatoes.com, is primarily an online repository of movie reviews. For each movie review document, the site provides a link to the full review, along with a brief description of its sentiment. The description consists of a rating (“fresh” or “rotten”) and a short quotation from the review. Other research (Pang, Lee, & Vaithyanathan 2002) has predicted a movie review’s rating from its text. In this paper, we focus on the quotation, which is a main (...) attraction to site users. A Rotten Tomatoes quotation is typically about one sentence in length and expresses concisely the reviewer’s opinion of the movie. To illustrate, Curtis Edmonds’s review of the documentary Spellbound is encapsulated, “Hitchcock couldn’t have asked for a more suspenseful situation.” A.O. Scott’s review of Once upon a Time in Mexico is encapsulated, “A noisy, unholy mess, with moments of wit and surprise that ultimately make its brutal tedium all the more disappointing.” A reader can infer from these statements whether or not the overall sentiment is favorable, and get an impression about why. Consequently, we refer to them as sentiment summaries. (shrink)

Play and Exploration in Animals — A Comparative Analysis Exploratory behavior and play are very often discussed together. However, despite many similarities they are two distinct forms of behavior. They have different evolutionary histories and they develop in different ways. Both forms of behavior play a crucial role in the development of sophisticated and complex psyche. The paper discusses similarities and differences between exploration and play. The hypothesis of the joint development of exploration, play and animal intelligence (...) is proposed. (shrink)

Although knowledge is a central topic for MKM there is little explicit discussion on what ‘knowledge’ might actually be. There are specific intuitions about form and content of knowledge, about its structure, and epistemological nature that shape the MKM systems, but a conceptual model is missing. In this paper we try to rationalize this discussion to give MKM a firmer footing, to start a discussion among MKM researchers and help relate the MKM intuitions and discourses to other communities. Starting from (...) the observation that many concrete realizations of mathematical knowledge objects are considered equivalent, we propose a conceptual model of the space of (mathematical) knowledge objects graded by levels of abstraction and presentational explicitness and draw conclusions for MKM markup formats. (shrink)

The aim of the present study, based on data from 20 countries, is to identify the pattern of variables (at country, school and student levels), which are typical of students performing below the low international benchmark compared to students performing at the advanced performance benchmark, in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006. The dependent variable of the analysis is a dichotomous variable, the values of which represent the two different performance groups of students. The independent variables are (...) two sets of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development educational indicators, variables from PIRLS 2006 Reading Curriculum Questionnaire data, variables and indices based on data obtained from questionnaires for teachers, schools, parents and students. The analysis is based on classification and regression trees, which is a full hierarchical non-parametric method suited to detecting and interpreting complex reciprocal influences between a large number of independent variables. The results show that pupils? performance can be predicted by the relationships between country-level variables (the changes in teachers? salaries at the top of the salary scale), school context variables (e.g. percentages of students from economically affluent home) and home educational resources and variables at student level (e.g. students? reading self-concept). (shrink)