Is public opinion a beloved but unreal myth like the unicorn? Or a thing out there in the garden like an elephant, of which sight-impaired, competing methodologists measure different parts? Or a fuzzy set of probabilities like the electron, both wave and particle, perhaps of inherently uncertain location? Or does it include all of the above? ...If we want to measure public opinion, we need to d...

In many real-world probabilistic reasoning problems, one of the questions we want to answer is: how many objects are out there? Examples of such problems range from multitarget tracking to extracting information from text documents. However, most probabilistic modeling formalisms — even firstorder ones — assume a fixed, known set of objects. We introduce a language called Blog for specifying pr...

Andy Hargreaves (Canada) Director and Professor at the International Centre for Educational Change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He is founding co-director of Professional Actions and Cultures of Teaching (PACT), from which the content of this issue is drawn. His book Changing teachers, changing times received the 1995 Outstanding Writing Award from the American Association...

In the current academic climate, there is no shortage of discourses proclaiming a veritable neurorevolution: that new insights into the functioning of the human brain will lead not only to novel possibilities of technoscientific intervention, but also to a radical transformation of our sense of what it is to be human in general. More striking still is the enthusiastic appropriation of this new ...

This paper defines and empirically tests a new concept of general trust in the remote-hosting (RH) vendor community. In the absence of prior experience or familiarity with RH vendors, and because third-party guarantees do not yet exist to assure expected results, previous trust mechanisms are inapplicable. Therefore, based on the Transaction Cost Economy theory and on the broad trust-related bo...

This article examines the ways in which Fflur Dafydd’s 2008 novel Twenty Thousand Saints negotiates notions of the island space in a post-devolution Welsh context. It argues that the novel is a rich site in the analysis of the literary dimension of what Baldacchino describes as the “island-mainland [...] dialectic” (Baldacchino, 2006, p. 10). Set on Bardsey, a real small island off the coast of...

The Scientific Manuscript This is a basic overview of a scientific manuscript. In the sections to follow, we will break down each section in detail. Structure of a Research Article The structure of a research article usually depends on the journal to which the article is being submitted. Many journals have page limits, figure limits, or specific article divisions to which authors must adhere. T...

According to the realistic approach to semantics the meaning of an expression is something out there in the world. In technical terms, a semantics for a language is seen as a mapping from the grammatical structures to things in the world (or in several possible worlds). Often meanings are defined in terms of truth conditions. A consequence of this approach is that the meaning of an expression i...

Illusions confuse and bias the machinery in the brain that constructs our representations of the world, because they reveal a discrepancy between what we perceive and what is objectively out there in the world. But both illusions and accurate perceptions are governed by the same lawful perceptual processes. Despite the deceptive simplicity of illusions, there are no fully agreed theories about ...

Are you saying that religion is also something that geneticists should be studying? No, not at all. Every individual has to find their own accommodation between their spirituality and their scientific knowledge. For me personally, there is no need for a god, and a secular world view is much richer and more hopeful, but obviously there are millions of Christians and Jews and Hindus and others wh...