Towards an authentic argumentation literacy test

A central goal of education is to improve argumentation literacy. How do we know how well this goal is achieved? Can we measure argumentation literacy? The present study is a preliminary step towards measuring the efficacy of education with regards to argumentation literacy. Tests currently in use to determine critical thinking skills are often similar to IQ-tests in that they predominantly measure logical and mathematical abilities. Thus, they may not measure the various other skills required in understanding authentic argumentation. To identify the elements of argumentation literacy, this exploratory study begins by surveying introductory textbooks within argumentation theory, critical thinking, and rhetoric. Eight main abilities have been identified. Then, the study outlines an Argumentation Literacy Test that would comprise these abilities suggested by the literature. Finally, the study presents results from a pilot of a version of such a test and discusses needs for further development

The INF Treaty of 1987

Der von Ronald Reagan und Michail Gorbatschow am 8. Dezember 1987 unterzeichnete »Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty«, kurz INF-Vertrag, stellte einen Meilenstein der nuklearen Abrüstungsverhandlungen zwischen den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika und der Sowjetunion dar. Im Jahr 2019 wurde er von Russland und den USA gekündigt. Der englischsprachige Band untersucht die Vorgeschichte des Abkommens, dessen Implementierung und Folgen sowohl in den beiden Supermächten als auch in den mit ihnen verbündeten Staaten. Er ist damit die erste umfassende Darstellung eines der wichtigsten Abrüstungsabkommen der jüngsten Zeit

Finland Suomi 100 : language, culture, history

This Festschrift was compiled to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Finland’s independence. The articles included in this book were written by scholars and teachers based at universities around the world. All of them presented varied themes on Finland: Finnish and other languages spoken in Finland, as well as Finnish culture and history

Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism

Reined into the service of the Cold War confrontation, antifascist ideology overshadowed the narrative about the Holocaust in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This led to the Western notion that in the Soviet Bloc there was a systematic suppression of the memory of the mass murder of European Jews. Going beyond disputing the mistaken opposition between “communist falsification” of history and the “repressed authentic” interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe, this work presents and analyzes the ways as the Holocaust was conceptualized in the Soviet-ruled parts of Europe. The authors provide various interpretations of the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in the communist countries, arguing that the predominance of an antifascist agenda and the acknowledgment of the Jewish catastrophe were far from mutually exclusive. The interactions included acts of negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing. Detailed case studies describe how both individuals and institutions were able to use anti-fascism as a framework to test and widen the boundaries for discussion of the Nazi genocide. The studies build on the new historiography of communism, focusing on everyday life and individual agency, revealing the formation of a great variety of concrete, local memory practices

Exodus, Expulsion, Explication: Collective Memories of Silesia as a German-Polish Frontier Zone

This thesis addresses the traumata associated with Poland’s frontier changes in 1945, within a collective memory paradigm. These events include expulsions from German territories incorporated into Poland, and population transfers between Poland and the USSR. The thesis addresses two components: a central trauma complex, and the resulting collective memory discourse. Being a matter of historical record, the statistical details and chronology of these events are seldom contested, although they have often been instrumentalised by various stakeholders. Instead, the relevant collective memory discourse has focused on the production of broad, often exculpatory, narrative frameworks designed to explain a set of largely accepted facts. Accordingly, my thesis is primarily focused on this collective memory discourse. As an active phase, dominated by stakeholders with a high level of emotional investment in the narration and memorialisation of the relevant events, this collective memory discourse is currently undergoing a transition to the domain of History as a scholarly pursuit. This transition is best symbolised by the fact that, as of 2016, for the first time since 1945, all restrictions on the acquisition of agricultural land and forests in Poland’s former German territories, by Germans, will be lifted. Thus, for surviving expellees, the right of return, in conjunction with the potential to purchase any formerly held real estate and landholdings, will become a de jure reality, marking the end of the region’s long postwar period. Arguably, therefore, one can now engage, at a retrospective, analytical level, with the relevant collective memory discourse without being drawn into it. In order to navigate this complex discourse, I have developed a number of analytical and conceptual tools, which I hope may prove useful beyond this project. In this sense, this thesis can be viewed as a proof of concept. Chief among these tools are a novel working definition of collective memory as a discrete phase in the historification and mythologizing of traumatic events, and a three-level model designed for the consistent analysis of narrative texts, artefacts and cultural productions. By tracing the relevant collective memory discourse through a number of 4 disparate fields, including political myth-making, historiography, toponymic practice, cartography and literature, I have been able to test these analytical and conceptual tools to breaking point, often benefiting from the resulting heuristic gain wherever lived complexity defies simplistic analytic idealisation. To ensure a focused exposition of the theoretical framework and the sources analysed, this thesis is primarily centred upon Lower Silesia and the following broad research questions: what geo-socio-political power dynamics resulted in Poland’s postwar frontier changes and the associated traumata, and how were they justified at the time? How have historians reacted over time to Poland’s postwar frontier changes, and the humanitarian consequences, as well as to contemporary framework narratives relating to these events? How has the toponymic re-inscription of Poland’s former German territories influenced the relevant collective memory discourse, and to what extent have cartographic representations of postwar Poland been influenced by changing geo-political configurations? How have the prevailing socio-political conditions in postwar Germany and Poland constrained literary contributions to the relevant collective memory discourse? And, finally, in what ways, has literature contributed in turn, to the relevant collective memory discourse and the establishment of hegemonic historical narratives? This thesis presents a number of specific findings, the most significant of which is that political contingencies can result in a surprising deflection of collective memory discourse into seemingly unrelated fields, and can trigger a ripple effect, which has the ability to globalise collective memory discourse under certain circumstances. Similarly, my analysis of shared topoi in the works of German and Polish historians and literary authors demonstrates that, far from generating its own framework of reference based on specific traumatic events, collective memory discourse is exquisitely sensitive to broader socio-political narratives. In addition, I contend that mainstream historical narratives tend to simplify, for example, through the imposition of a chronology on multidirectional memories, and by focusing on homogenizing accounts of the collective at the expense of 5 individual narratives. In contrast, literature and local cultural performances often resist such simplification, thus preserving complexity. Viewed in this light, the pursuit of Cultural and Literary Studies addresses a clear problem within, and usefully augments, traditional historical scholarship. By carefully analysing a subset of Polish and German literature, historiography and cultural artefacts produced in response to the traumatic events in question, my thesis seeks to trace the transition from highly localised stakeholder-led collective memory discourses to hegemonic historical narratives developed and maintained in the service of broader geo-political agendas

Remembrance and solidarity

Holocaust/Shoah Issue Number 5. (December 2016

Enhancing explainability and scrutability of recommender systems

Our increasing reliance on complex algorithms for recommendations calls for models and methods for explainable, scrutable, and trustworthy AI. While explainability is required for understanding the relationships between model inputs and outputs, a scrutable system allows us to modify its behavior as desired. These properties help bridge the gap between our expectations and the algorithm’s behavior and accordingly boost our trust in AI. Aiming to cope with information overload, recommender systems play a crucial role in filtering content (such as products, news, songs, and movies) and shaping a personalized experience for their users. Consequently, there has been a growing demand from the information consumers to receive proper explanations for their personalized recommendations. These explanations aim at helping users understand why certain items are recommended to them and how their previous inputs to the system relate to the generation of such recommendations. Besides, in the event of receiving undesirable content, explanations could possibly contain valuable information as to how the system’s behavior can be modified accordingly. In this thesis, we present our contributions towards explainability and scrutability of recommender systems: • We introduce a user-centric framework, FAIRY, for discovering and ranking post-hoc explanations for the social feeds generated by black-box platforms. These explanations reveal relationships between users’ profiles and their feed items and are extracted from the local interaction graphs of users. FAIRY employs a learning-to-rank (LTR) method to score candidate explanations based on their relevance and surprisal. • We propose a method, PRINCE, to facilitate provider-side explainability in graph-based recommender systems that use personalized PageRank at their core. PRINCE explanations are comprehensible for users, because they present subsets of the user’s prior actions responsible for the received recommendations. PRINCE operates in a counterfactual setup and builds on a polynomial-time algorithm for finding the smallest counterfactual explanations. • We propose a human-in-the-loop framework, ELIXIR, for enhancing scrutability and subsequently the recommendation models by leveraging user feedback on explanations. ELIXIR enables recommender systems to collect user feedback on pairs of recommendations and explanations. The feedback is incorporated into the model by imposing a soft constraint for learning user-specific item representations. We evaluate all proposed models and methods with real user studies and demonstrate their benefits at achieving explainability and scrutability in recommender systems.Unsere zunehmende Abhängigkeit von komplexen Algorithmen für maschinelle Empfehlungen erfordert Modelle und Methoden für erklärbare, nachvollziehbare und vertrauenswürdige KI. Zum Verstehen der Beziehungen zwischen Modellein- und ausgaben muss KI erklärbar sein. Möchten wir das Verhalten des Systems hingegen nach unseren Vorstellungen ändern, muss dessen Entscheidungsprozess nachvollziehbar sein. Erklärbarkeit und Nachvollziehbarkeit von KI helfen uns dabei, die Lücke zwischen dem von uns erwarteten und dem tatsächlichen Verhalten der Algorithmen zu schließen und unser Vertrauen in KI-Systeme entsprechend zu stärken. Um ein Übermaß an Informationen zu verhindern, spielen Empfehlungsdienste eine entscheidende Rolle um Inhalte (z.B. Produkten, Nachrichten, Musik und Filmen) zu filtern und deren Benutzern eine personalisierte Erfahrung zu bieten. Infolgedessen erheben immer mehr In- formationskonsumenten Anspruch auf angemessene Erklärungen für deren personalisierte Empfehlungen. Diese Erklärungen sollen den Benutzern helfen zu verstehen, warum ihnen bestimmte Dinge empfohlen wurden und wie sich ihre früheren Eingaben in das System auf die Generierung solcher Empfehlungen auswirken. Außerdem können Erklärungen für den Fall, dass unerwünschte Inhalte empfohlen werden, wertvolle Informationen darüber enthalten, wie das Verhalten des Systems entsprechend geändert werden kann. In dieser Dissertation stellen wir unsere Beiträge zu Erklärbarkeit und Nachvollziehbarkeit von Empfehlungsdiensten vor. • Mit FAIRY stellen wir ein benutzerzentriertes Framework vor, mit dem post-hoc Erklärungen für die von Black-Box-Plattformen generierten sozialen Feeds entdeckt und bewertet werden können. Diese Erklärungen zeigen Beziehungen zwischen Benutzerprofilen und deren Feeds auf und werden aus den lokalen Interaktionsgraphen der Benutzer extrahiert. FAIRY verwendet eine LTR-Methode (Learning-to-Rank), um die Erklärungen anhand ihrer Relevanz und ihres Grads unerwarteter Empfehlungen zu bewerten. • Mit der PRINCE-Methode erleichtern wir das anbieterseitige Generieren von Erklärungen für PageRank-basierte Empfehlungsdienste. PRINCE-Erklärungen sind für Benutzer verständlich, da sie Teilmengen früherer Nutzerinteraktionen darstellen, die für die erhaltenen Empfehlungen verantwortlich sind. PRINCE-Erklärungen sind somit kausaler Natur und werden von einem Algorithmus mit polynomieller Laufzeit erzeugt , um präzise Erklärungen zu finden. • Wir präsentieren ein Human-in-the-Loop-Framework, ELIXIR, um die Nachvollziehbarkeit der Empfehlungsmodelle und die Qualität der Empfehlungen zu verbessern. Mit ELIXIR können Empfehlungsdienste Benutzerfeedback zu Empfehlungen und Erklärungen sammeln. Das Feedback wird in das Modell einbezogen, indem benutzerspezifischer Einbettungen von Objekten gelernt werden. Wir evaluieren alle Modelle und Methoden in Benutzerstudien und demonstrieren ihren Nutzen hinsichtlich Erklärbarkeit und Nachvollziehbarkeit von Empfehlungsdiensten

Migration, Integration, Asylumin Germany 2019: Political and Legal Developments

Der jährlich erscheinende Politikbericht der nationalen Kontaktstelle des Europäischen Migrationsnetzwerks (EMN) beschreibt für knapp ein Dutzend Themenfelder im Bereich der Migrations-, Integration- und Asylpolitik relevante Entwicklungen im Jahr 2019. Der 16. Politikbericht im Rahmen des EMN bietet wie gewohnt einen Überblick über die wichtigsten politischen, rechtlichen und institutionellen Entwicklungen des Jahres 2019 in den folgenden Bereichen: Allgemeine politische, rechtliche und institutionelle Struktur, legale Zuwanderung und Mobilität, internationaler Schutz und Asyl, unbegleitete Minderjährige und andere besonders schutzbedürftige Personengruppen, Integration und Antidiskriminierung, Staatsangehörigkeit und Staatenlosigkeit, Grenzkontrolle und Visapolitik, irreguläre Migration und Schleusung, Rückkehr, Menschenhandel und Migration und Entwicklung.The annual policy report of the National Contact Point of the European Migration Network (EMN) describes relevant developments of the year 2019 across several topical areas in migration, integration and asylum policy. As usual, the 16th Policy Report of the EMN provides an overview of the most important political, legal and institutional developments in 2019 in the following areas: general political, legal and institutional structure, legal migration and mobility, international protection and asylum, naccompanied minors and other vulnerable groups, integration and non-discrimination, citizenship and statelessness, border control and visa policy, irregular migration, migrant smuggling, returns, trafficking in human beings, and migration and development

New Global Perspectives on Archaeological Prospection

This volume is a product of the 13th International Conference on Archaeological Prospection 2019, which was hosted by the Department of Environmental Science in the Faculty of Science at the Institute of Technology Sligo. The conference is held every two years under the banner of the International Society for Archaeological Prospection and this was the first time that the conference was held in Ireland. New Global Perspectives on Archaeological Prospection draws together over 90 papers addressing archaeological prospection techniques, methodologies and case studies from 33 countries across Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe and North America, reflecting current and global trends in archaeological prospection. At this particular ICAP meeting, specific consideration was given to the development and use of archaeological prospection in Ireland, archaeological feedback for the prospector, applications of prospection technology in the urban environment and the use of legacy data. Papers include novel research areas such as magnetometry near the equator, drone-mounted radar, microgravity assessment of tombs, marine electrical resistivity tomography, convolutional neural networks, data processing, automated interpretive workflows and modelling as well as recent improvements in remote sensing, multispectral imaging and visualisation