The Tyranny of a Metaphor

Debates on the practical relevance of ideal theory revolve around Sen's metaphor of navigating a mountainous landscape. In *The Tyranny of the Ideal*, Gerald Gaus presents the most thorough articulation of this metaphor to date. His detailed exploration yields new insight on central issues in existing debates, as well as a fruitful medium for exploring important limitations on our ability to map the space of social possibilities. Yet Gaus's heavy reliance on the navigation metaphor obscures questions about the reasoning by which ideal theories are justified. As a result, Gaus fails to notice the ways in which his theory of the Open Society resembles the ideal theories he aims to dismiss. Ironically, Gaus winds up neglecting the ways in which the Open Society might tyrannize our efforts to realize greater justice. (This article is part of a symposium on Gaus's *The Tyranny of the Ideal*.

Introductory Overview of Quark Matter 2012

The two arguably most generic phenomena seen in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions are the flow of essentially all soft hadronic observables and the quenching of essentially all hard hadronic observables. Limiting the discussion to these two classes of phenomena, I review what can be said so far about the properties of hot and dense QCD matter from the heavy ion programs at RHIC and at the LHC, and I discuss the opportunities for further progress in the coming years.Comment: 8 pages, write-up of plenary talk at Quark Matter 2012 in Washington, to appear in the QM12 conference proceeding

Learning through institutional competition

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How Should Competition Policies and Intellectual Property Issues Interact in a Globalised World? A Schumpeterian Perspective

In the 21 century globalized economy, innovation, antitrust issues and (new) intellectual property rules are in the forefront of every government, large company and policy making debates. This paper aims to be a preliminary effort to contribute for a better understanding of the interactions between Competition policies (rather than antitrust) and Intellectual Property issues under a schumpeterian perspective and, therefore, towards a more coherent framework within which the discussions of both institutional building and policy design towards development can proceed. The policy-institutions resulting from the analyses should be flexible and pragmatic, and should have creative destruction management – or the promotion and regulation of entrepreneurial success – as its main goal. The key insight of the policy prescriptions proposed to deal with the question is the need of a huge dose of “strategic state action” and a high degree of international cooperation.

The effect of multiple knowledge sources on learning and teaching

Current paradigms for machine-based learning and teaching tend to perform their task in isolation from a rich context of existing knowledge. In contrast, the research project presented here takes the view that bringing multiple sources of knowledge to bear is of central importance to learning in complex domains. As a consequence teaching must both take advantage of and beware of interactions between new and existing knowledge. The central process which connects learning to its context is reasoning by analogy, a primary concern of this research. In teaching, the connection is provided by the explicit use of a learning model to reason about the choice of teaching actions. In this learning paradigm, new concepts are incrementally refined and integrated into a body of expertise, rather than being evaluated against a static notion of correctness. The domain chosen for this experimentation is that of learning to solve "algebra story problems." A model of acquiring problem solving skills in this domain is described, including: representational structures for background knowledge, a problem solving architecture, learning mechanisms, and the role of analogies in applying existing problem solving abilities to novel problems. Examples of learning are given for representative instances of algebra story problems. After relating our views to the psychological literature, we outline the design of a teaching system. Finally, we insist on the interdependence of learning and teaching and on the synergistic effects of conducting both research efforts in parallel

Integrating knowledge accross disciplines. Experiences from the NeWater project

The starting question for this deliverable was how to create a new adaptive management concept that can integrate insights from various disciplines and connect people from different institutional backgrounds. From literature research and empirical research on the NeWater project we identified challenges for cross-disciplinary knowledge integration, we evaluated interventions for connecting multiple knowledge frames, we analyzed the process of group model building with UML and formulated recommendations. Cross-disciplinary research has arisen from a growing number of complex problems for which knowledge of a single scientific discipline or societal field is insufficient, but presents important challenges: (1) collaboration and integration of knowledge requires in depth discussions that are timeconsuming; (2) the recursive process of problem structuring and restructuring is often at odds with the sequential planning of project activities; (3) participation and mutual learning are crucial but need to be carefully structured and sequenced; and (4) management and leadership faces the difficult challenge of balancing in depth exploration with timely delivery of tangible results. We conclude with the following general recommendations for large cross-disciplinary projects: (1) including a preparatory proposal phase for thorough exploration of opportunities of between researchers and stakeholders (2) flexible funding, planning and operational arrangements to allow for a recursive research process; (3) a project size that allows frequent interaction opportunities between researchers and between researchers and stakeholders to allow for mutual learning and in depth exploration; and (4) enhancing learning opportunities from one project to the next