And the Winner Is...Capturing the Promise of Philanthropic Prizes

Philanthropists and governments have long used prizes to drive innovation and engagement to produce societal benefit, but the use of this powerful instrument is undergoing a renaissance. Philanthropic prizes are growing in number and size, are appearing in new forms, and are being applied to a wider range of societal objectives by a wider range of sponsors than ever before. Not all of the growth has been positive, however, as the many overlapping prizes and growing clutter of the sector attests. In response, current and potential participants are asking when they should use prizes, and how they can develop and deliver effective ones. This report addresses these questions by drawing on academic literature, interviews with analysts and practitioners, surveys of prize sponsors and competitors, databases of small and large awards, and case studies of twelve effective prizes to produce lessons from a range of sectors, goals, and prize types. It aims to help improve current prizes and stimulate effective future use by developing a number of simple frameworks and compiling useful lessons for sponsors. While targeting the philanthropic sponsor, we believe these perspectives will also be helpful to governments and corporations considering prizes. Our research found that prizes are a unique and powerful tool that should be in the basic toolkit of many of today's philanthropists. Their recent renaissance is largely due to a new appreciation for the multiple ways in which they can produce change: not only by identifying new levels of excellence and by encouraging specific innovations, but also by changing wider perceptions, improving the performance of communities of problem-solvers, building the skills of individuals, and mobilizing new talent or capital. These change drivers give prize sponsors compelling opportunities to use the open, competitive, and media-friendly attributes of prizes to stimulate attention and drive innovation in a highly leveraged and result-focused way. Recent prize growth is reinforced by powerful external trends such as the arrival of new philanthropic wealth, different attitudes to shifting risk, interest in open source approaches, and an increasingly networked, media-driven and technology-intensive world. We believe that the outlook for prizes is particularly strong because of the increased interest of philanthropists and the emergence of an industry of prize facilitators that is driving improvements in prize economics and improved practices for managing execution challenges and risks

Completions, Coordination, and Alignment in Dialogue

Collaborative completions are among the strongest evidence that dialogue requires coordination even at the sub-sentential level; the study of sentence completions may thus shed light on a number of central issues both at the `macro’ level of dialogue management and at the `micro’ level of the semantic interpretation of utterances. We propose a treatment of collaborative completions in PTT, a theory of interpretation in dialogue that provides some of the necessary ingredients for a formal account of completions at the ‘micro’ level, such a theory of incremental utterance interpretation and an account of grounding. We argue that an account of semantic interpretation in completions can be provided through relatively straightforward generalizations of existing theories of syntax such as Lexical Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) and of semantics such as (Compositional) DRT and SituationSemantics. At the macro level, we provide an intentional account of completions, as well as a preliminary account within Pickering and Garrod’s alignment theory

Relevance, Rhetoric, and Argumentation: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry into Patterns of Thinking and Information Structuring

This dissertation research is a multidisciplinary inquiry into topicality, involving an in-depth examination of literatures and empirical data and an inductive development of a faceted typology (containing 227 fine-grained topical relevance relationships and 33 types of presentation relationship). This inquiry investigates a large variety of topical connections beyond topic matching, renders a closer look into the structure of a topic, achieves an enriched understanding of topicality and relevance, and induces a cohesive topic-oriented information architecture that is meaningful across topics and domains. The findings from the analysis contribute to the foundation work of information organization, intellectual access / information retrieval, and knowledge discovery. Using qualitative content analysis, the inquiry focuses on meaning and deep structure: Phase 1 : develop a unified theory-grounded typology of topical relevance relationships through close reading of literature and synthesis of thinking from communication, rhetoric, cognitive psychology, education, information science, argumentation, logic, law, medicine, and art history; Phase 2 : in-depth qualitative analysis of empirical relevance datasets in oral history, clinical question answering, and art image tagging, to examine manifestations of the theory-grounded typology in various contexts and to further refine the typology; the three relevance datasets were used for analysis to achieve variation in form, domain, and context. The typology of topical relevance relationships is structured with three major facets: Functional role of a piece of information plays in the overall structure of a topic or an argument; Mode of reasoning: How information contributes to the user's reasoning about a topic; Semantic relationship: How information connects to a topic semantically. This inquiry demonstrated that topical relevance with its close linkage to thinking and reasoning is central to many disciplines. The multidisciplinary approach allows synthesis and examination from new angles, leading to an integrated scheme of relevance relationships or a system of thinking that informs each individual discipline. The scheme resolving from the synthesis can be used to improve text and image understanding, knowledge organization and retrieval, reasoning, argumentation, and thinking in general, by people and machines

Teacher Knowledge: An Ideal Typology

ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: TEACHER KNOWLEDGE: AN IDEAL TYPOLOGY Gordon Anthony Michaloski, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Dissertation directed by: Professor Linda Valli, Department of Curriculum and Instruction This collective case study examined the possible roles for received knowledge and classroom experience in the formation of an ideal typology for teacher knowledge. The problematic nature of teacher knowledge development was examined with regard to behavioral, psychological, and social influences. Theoretical underpinnings drew principally from schema theory and formative theory about the nature and development of teacher knowledge. The compatibility of tacit and codified knowledge about teaching was a key concern. Special attention was given to examining how teachers integrate received knowledge with classroom experience and the frequently reported discord between the two. Other issues addressed included teacher compliance and the effectiveness of teacher preparation. An initial conceptual framework founded upon possible roles for received knowledge and classroom experience was expanded into an ideal topology for teacher knowledge when combined with a concern for personal versus collaborative processes. Data suggested four ideal types: a) personal-experiential, b) personal-received, c) collaborative-experiential, and d) collaborative-received. The qualitative research design involved open-ended questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and lesson plan documents from 14 classroom teachers in the mid-Atlantic region. Participants were chosen from public and private schools, and were diverse in ethnicity, gender, years of experience, teacher preparation, and grade levels taught. The purpose of the study was twofold: a) to arrive at a better understanding of the relationship between received knowledge and classroom experience in the formation of knowledge about teaching, and b) to contribute toward general theory on teacher knowledge and its development. The study is significant in that a better understanding of how teachers integrate classroom experience with received knowledge may contribute to a more workable model for teacher knowledge development and thereby contribute toward more effective planning of teacher education, professional development, and graduate level coursework

Non-Being and Memory: A Critique of Pure Difference in Derrida and Deleuze

The psychology philosophy split has restricted viable readings of today\u27s psychological research. My project (within the philosophy of psychology) is to provide these readings. Specifically, in this dissertation I analyze the data and the interpretations of a large number of contemporary memory research articles. I use these articles to support my claim that Immanuel Kant misunderstood what in the Critique of Pure Reason he labeled affinity. Further, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze inherit this Kantian misunderstanding by way of G.W.F. Hegel\u27s attempt to eliminate it. Put another way, the component in question is that which grounds the post-structuralist justification for pure difference, and the wider context of this discussion is Plato\u27s problem of non-being. That is, Kant\u27s reading of affinity and Derrida\u27s and Deleuze\u27s respective readings of pure difference all function as failed attempts to solve the problem of non-being. Taking Plato\u27s Parmenides and Sophist as points of departure, I show how each of the above mentioned thinkers, including Aristotle, fails to meet Plato\u27s criteria for, i.e. solve, the problem of non-being. I then use contemporary memory research for the sake of enunciating my own solution to Plato\u27s problem. The critical structure of my discourse is directed at Derrida and Deleuze, then, as a critique of their readings of pure difference, and this is to accentuate the difference between my response to the problem and theirs. Kant\u27s misunderstanding of memory committed him to an ontological filled-duration illusion. On the one hand, my reading of contemporary memory research depicts being as bound by memory. On the other hand, memory\u27s binding is governed by play, i.e. memory as being\u27s play-ground. And, gaps can be noticed by regarding shifting engagements of procedural memory or memory\u27s cycling, though these gaps are often covered over by priming and habitual scripts. Hence, just as these gaps justify calling ontological filled-duration illusory, these gaps also constitute my solution to the problem of non-being. I paraphrase the fruit of solving the problem: Your being is not persisting; it is pulsing. Perhaps the largest impact of my solution is to be found in ethics