Organisation and Context, Efficiency and Equity of Educational Systems: What PISA Tells Us

Understanding PISA and What It Tells Us About Educational Standards in Ireland Executive Summary

Through animal eyes: What behaviour tells us

To Charles Darwin, it was obvious that animals are sentient, so why should the idea not be now universally accepted? I review the difficulties and issues with animal sentience with a view to answering some of the critics. Sentience is ‘the hard problem’ and it is important we acknowledge the difficulties and do not claim too much for the evidence we have. Two sorts of evidence are examined: evi...

What Humour Tells Us About Discourse Theories

Many verbal jokes, like garden path sentences, pose difficulties to models of discourse since the initially primed interpretation needs to be discarded and a new one created based on subsequent statements. The effect of the joke depends on the fact that the second (correct) interpretation was not visible earlier. Existing models of discourse semantics in principle generate all interpretations o...

Rain-Use-Efficiency: What it Tells us about the Conflicting Sahel Greening and Sahelian Paradox

Rain Use Efficiency (RUE), defined as Aboveground Net Primary Production (ANPP) divided by rainfall, is increasingly used to diagnose land degradation. Yet, the outcome of RUE monitoring has been much debated since opposite results were found about land degradation in the Sahel region. The debate is fueled by methodological issues, especially when using satellite remote sensing data to estimate...

Attracting and Selecting: What Psychological Research Tells Us

an organization’s varied needs when it comes to recruiting and staffing. One often hears that the proposed solution to a “people problem” is to do a better job in the recruiting process of attracting better people, do a better job in the hiring process of identifying future stars and “weeding out” the problems, and do a better job of attracting and selecting a more diverse workforce. Moreover, ...