Literature For Learning: Can Stories Enhance Children’s Education?

This article asks how children might benefit from story in their general education. It distinguishes between story for entertainment and stories for learning. Stories not only can be memorable, but can stimulate a child reader to think intellectually, socially, morally and spiritually if they are encouraged and taught how to do this. It argues that the reading of stories is part of critical education and introduces the idea of embodied learning. We conclude by asking whether stories are valuable as just stories, or whether there needs also to be some pedagogical purpose

The Whalesong

Photojournalist visits Iraq, says media biased -- Big Brothers Big Sisters asks UAS for more help -- Campus calendar -- Transformations abound at Perseverance Theatre -- Hate, lack of support hurts American effort -- Hardly fair or balanced: Fox News fails to live up to its slogan -- Made in Alaska totem pole tells story of oil exploration -- Campus lif

The Whalesong

Southeast waffle company -- Lightning strikes at UAS -- Please be cautious when on the roadway -- Two questions for elected public servants -- Ethics notice for public servants and their aides -- United Students of UAS -- Student Government hopes to help U of A strategic plan -- Travel paradise for credit -- Creating future leaders -- Winterfest -- Smile! You're on campus camera -- Help for the weary -- Fight fatigue -- Informed-traitor advice -- Friday the 13th quiz -- Web winners: helping you keep tabs on the election -- Young people still making black history -- Haute chocolat

Tango: the intimate dance of conflict transformation

The tango. Two dancers stand apart at first, looking at each other. The connection begins before the leader invites the follower to enter into the embrace. There is delicious enjoyment in the moment when both dancers find comfort and stability as the music begins to beat a rhythm in their blood and in their feet. The dancers are drawn together into the intimate space they will share for the next three minutes, repeated for as long as they wish, and knowing that no two dances with the same partner will ever be the same

Framework for Sino-Tibetan Negotiations

Text of address at European Parliament, Strasbourg, June 15, 198

African Metaphysics and Religious Ethics

Scholars of African moral thought reject the possibility of an African religious ethics by invoking at least three major reasons. The first objection to ‘ethical supernaturalism’ argues that it is part of those aspects of African culture that are ‘anachronistic’ insofar as they are superstitious rather than rational; as such, they should be jettisoned. The second objection points out that ethical supernaturalism is incompatible with the utilitarian approach to religion that typically characterises some African peoples’ orientation to it. The last objection argues that religious ethics by their very nature require the feature (of revelation), which is generally lacking in African religious experiences. The facet of revelation is crucial for a religious ethics since it solves the epistemological problem of knowing the will of God or the content of morality. In this article, I construct a vitality-based African religious moral theory; and, I argue that it can successfully meet these objections

Multirelational Organization of Large-scale Social Networks in an Online World

The capacity to collect fingerprints of individuals in online media has revolutionized the way researchers explore human society. Social systems can be seen as a non-linear superposition of a multitude of complex social networks, where nodes represent individuals and links capture a variety of different social relations. Much emphasis has been put on the network topology of social interactions, however, the multi-dimensional nature of these interactions has largely been ignored in empirical studies, mostly because of lack of data. Here, for the first time, we analyze a complete, multi-relational, large social network of a society consisting of the 300,000 odd players of a massive multiplayer online game. We extract networks of six different types of one-to-one interactions between the players. Three of them carry a positive connotation (friendship, communication, trade), three a negative (enmity, armed aggression, punishment). We first analyze these types of networks as separate entities and find that negative interactions differ from positive interactions by their lower reciprocity, weaker clustering and fatter-tail degree distribution. We then proceed to explore how the inter-dependence of different network types determines the organization of the social system. In particular we study correlations and overlap between different types of links and demonstrate the tendency of individuals to play different roles in different networks. As a demonstration of the power of the approach we present the first empirical large-scale verification of the long-standing structural balance theory, by focusing on the specific multiplex network of friendship and enmity relations.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in PNA

National Security in the Information Age

The information environment has been changing right along with the broader security environment. Today, the information environment connects almost everyone, almost everywhere, almost instantaneously. The media environment has become global, and there’s no longer such thing as “the news cycle” —everything is 24/7. Barriers between US and global publics have virtual disappeared: Everything and anything can “go viral” instantly, and it’s no longer possible to say one thing to a US audience and another thing to a foreign audience and assume no one will ever set the statements side by side. The Pakistani military has a very clear idea of what the Secretary of Defense tells Congress about Pakistan, for instance—and Congress has an equally clear idea of how Pakistani leaders talk about the United States to their domestic constituencies. Technological changes and lower costs have also democratized the media and information environment: Internet and cell phone access is increasingly ubiquitous, and individuals and organizations are ever more reliant on electronic communication. Today, news, commentary, and video can be produced and accessed equally by first world media producers, Washington decision-makers, Iowa housewives, Afghan shepherds, Chinese university students, Colombian insurgents, and Al Qaeda members. As with the security environment more broadly, the rapidly changing information environment creates both new challenges and new opportunities for the US government. The author emphasizes that this is true across the executive branch. All USG agencies, from Defense to State to Treasury and beyond, are struggling to adapt anachronistic programs and policies