Drawing upon concepts from actor‐network theory (ANT), this article explores how the principle of symmetry can provide alternative readings of the translations of the prescribed into the enacted curriculum, without reducing understanding to explanation. The paper explores the contrasting ways in which the prescribed curriculum is translated into the enacted curriculum as certain organisations, individuals and artefacts become enrolled through networks of school and college. It points to the ways in which a position which eschews conventional distinctions e.g. between the (...) human and non‐human, and enacts an anti‐foundationalist ontology provides the basis for a radical materialist understanding of the multiplicity of educational practices. (shrink)

In considering two extended examples of educational reform efforts, this discussion traces relations that become visible through analytic approaches associated with actor‐network theory . The strategy here is to present multiple readings of the two examples. The first reading adopts an ANT approach to follow ways that all actors—human and non‐human entities, including the entity that is taken to be ‘educational reform’—are performed into being through the play of linkages among heterogeneous elements. Then, further readings focus not only on the (...) material practices that become enacted and distributed, but also on the otherings that occur: the various fluid spaces and ambivalent belongings that create actor‐network but also escape them. For educational research, particularly in educational reform and policy, it is argued that ANT analyses are particularly useful to examine the complex enactments in these dynamics. That is, ANT can illuminate movements of ordering and disordering that occur through minute socio‐material connections in educational interventions. ANT readings also can discern, within these attempts to order people and practices, the spaces of flux and instability that enable and protect alternate possibilities. (shrink)

Papers addressing the role which human motivation plays in a wide range of specialties including clinical psychology, internal medicine, sports psychology, ...

A number of theoretical positions in psychology—including variants of case‐based reasoning, instance‐based analogy, and connectionist models—maintain that abstract rules are not involved in human reasoning, or at best play a minor role. Other views hold that the use of abstract rules is a core aspect of human reasoning. We propose eight criteria for determining whether or not people use abstract rules in reasoning, and examine evidence relevant to each criterion for several rule systems. We argue that there is substantial evidence (...) that several different inferential rules, including modus ponens, contractual rules, causal rules, and the law of large numbers, are used in solving everyday problems. We discuss the implications for various theoretical positions and consider hybrid mechanisms that combine aspects of instance and rule models. (shrink)

A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation‐based and memory‐based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models. Our model, lossy‐context surprisal, holds that the processing difficulty at a word in context is proportional to (...) the surprisal of the word given a lossy memory representation of the context—that is, a memory representation that does not contain complete information about previous words. We show that this model provides an intuitive explanation for an outstanding puzzle involving interactions of memory and expectations: language‐dependent structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on sentence processing appear to be moderated by language statistics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory‐based theories, can be derived from lossy‐context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality. (shrink)

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) zählt zu den herausragendsten Komponisten der Welt überhaupt und gilt aufgrund seiner musikalischen Interpretationen als ein Erneuerer der europäischen Musiklandschaft. Er fühlte eine enge Verbindung zu Ludwig van Beethoven, da eben sein Werk für die Entscheidung verantwortlich war, sich der Musik zuzuwenden. Das vorliegende Werk ist eine Hommage an den deutschen Künstler und erschien zu seinem einhundersten Geburtsjahr 1870. Es handelt sich hierbei um die englische Übersetzung der deutschen Originalfassung.

Evaluating the current locus equation under ideal conditions identifies important and unexpected parameter dependencies. Locus equation (LE) utility, either as a valid laboratory tool or possible invariant cue, depends on stringent specification of critical parameters and rigorous empirical testing.

This article provides a brief background of key issues in physician burnout, a significant problem in the healthcare industry. The extent and severity of burnout are not well understood, and those seeking help are often stigmatized. A number of different approaches to alleviating burnout have been suggested, but the problem lacks any single or simple solution.We posit that an ethics committee may be well positioned to help address this issue because of its unique position within an institution. An ethics committee (...) serves the entire hospital staff regardless of department. As such it may be able to identify common elements in the development of burnout, and can serve as a conduit to administration in identifying these. An ethics committee can obtain information about the extent of burnout by conducting surveys to assess the extent and severity of burnout in an institution, and serve as a central resource to help address and alleviate it.Finally, an ethics committee may be able to act as an intermediary between practitioners and the administration, in advising the administration of the extent of the problem and offer suggestions for alleviating it. (shrink)

We revisit the question of price elasticity of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) take-up by directly examining changes in the take-up of ESI at a large firm in response to exogenous changes in employee premium contributions. We find that, on average, a 10% increase in the employee's out-of-pocket premium increases the probability of dropping coverage by approximately 1%. More importantly, we find heterogeneous impacts: married workers are much more price-sensitive than single employees, and lower-paid workers are disproportionately more likely to drop coverage (...) than higher-paid workers. Elasticity estimates for employees below the 25th percentile of salary distribution in our sample are nearly twice the average. (shrink)

David E. Cooper Early in, while I was teaching in the United States, I received news of my appointment as a lecturer in the philosophy of education at the ...