The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) mark a historic and eff ective method of global mobilisation to achieve a set of important social priorities worldwide. They express widespread public concern about poverty, hunger, disease, unmet schooling, gender inequality, and environmental degradation. By packaging these priorities into an easily understandable set of eight goals, and by establishing...

While many people think of an individualism-communalism dichotomy, it is better to think in terms of a range of variation in the way a particular culture balances two human truths: that humans live in groups and draw significant parts of their beliefs and self-definitions from their groups, and that human individuals are also conscious of themselves as separate beings and seeking individual goa...

If we are keen to boost the process of language learning, we need to study every aspect and component of our course. To this end, we carry out an investigation in which every detail of the course is put under microscope. Assessment of a course is an attempt in which different type of information is gathered systematically in order to study the working of a language instruction program. Certainl...

A defining characteristic of intelligent software agents is their ability to flexibly and reliably pursue goals, and many modern agent platforms provide some form of goal construct. However, these platforms are surprisingly naive in their handling of interactions between goals. Whilst previous work has provided mechanisms to identify and react appropriately to various sorts of interactions, it ...

Several years back, a meeting of the Operations Executive Council in my company was focused on the five-year corporate planning effort then getting underway. At this meeting I distributed a simple framework for classifying, organizing, and analyzing goals and objectives (see the Goals Grid in Figure 1 below). My colleagues saw this framework as very useful and so I was led to present it to a wi...