U nder pressure to improve s t ud e nt a c h ie ve me nt , schools throughout the nation have, over the past 20 years, turned to comprehensive school reform (CSR). CSR is based on the idea that a school should have a coherent educational strategy that addresses all aspects of its operations and aligns them in a well-functioning delivery system. Hundreds of CSR models have been developed. More t...

To a majority of the people involved in the study of expertise from a computational perspective, `expertise' tends to refer to domains such as medical diagnosis, aircraft piloting, auditing, etc. The reasoning in domains like these appears to be ready-made for computational packaging. But what if we try to cast a broader, braver net in an attempt to catch varieties of expertise out there in the...

The cosmological “equation of state parameter”, w, is equal to −1 for a true cosmological constant, and is greater than −1 for quintessence. There is a widespread reluctance to consider the remaining possibility, w < −1, though in fact there is a variety of theoretical and observational evidence in favour of this range. We briefly discuss some of the objections to w < −1 and show that each of t...

In order to be able to evaluate beforehand the impact of a strategic or tactical move so as to plan optimal strategies to reach their goals, decision makers need reliable predictive systems. What-if analysis is a data-intensive simulation whose goal is to inspect the behavior of a complex system, such as the corporate business or a part of it, under some given hypotheses called scenarios. In pa...

Three perspectives are better than one. And it has been over 15 years since the two papers under discussion were published--a long time to remember who was thinking what. So the three of us (Roger, Jun, and I) will have three separate goes at reconstructing the events. For over 10 years, and through the early 1980s, our lab had concentrated on gene regulation in phage lambda. By 1985 we had cle...