Should Mission Statements Be Promises? (And should they have to be?)

This paper explores how mission statements might become a resource for improving nonprofit governance and accountability. The author asks what legal duty or moral obligation nonprofit organizations should be under to articulate a mission statement that others (the government, donors, prospective beneficiaries, the public at large) could use to assess their goals and performance. The paper explores how mission statements might include auditable claims, rather than vague aspirations, and raises questions about how various stakeholders might be empowered to use mission statements in holding an organization to account.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 33.5. Hauser Working Paper Series Nos. 33.1-33.9 were prepared as background papers for the Nonprofit Governance and Accountability Symposium October 3-4, 2006

The development of complex verb constructions in British Sign Language

This study focuses on the mapping of events onto verb-argument structures in British Sign Language (BSL). The development of complex sentences in BSL is described in a group of 30 children, aged 3;2–12;0, using data from comprehension measures and elicited sentence production. The findings support two interpretations: firstly, in the mapping of concepts onto language, children acquiring BSL overgeneralize the use of argument structure related to perspective shifting;secondly, these overgeneralizations are predicted by the typological characteristics of the language and modality. Children under age 6;0, in attempting to produce sentences encoded through a perspective shift, begin by breaking down double-verb constructions (AB verbs) into components, producing only the part of the verb phrase which describes the perspective of the patient. There is also a prolonged period of development of non-manual features, with the full structure not seen in its adult form until after 9;0. The errors in the use of AB verbs and the subsequent protracted development of correct usage are explained in terms of the conceptual–linguistic interface

The generic task toolset: High level languages for the construction of planning and problem solving systems

The current generation of languages for the construction of knowledge-based systems as being at too low a level of abstraction is criticized, and the need for higher level languages for building problem solving systems is advanced. A notion of generic information processing tasks in knowledge-based problem solving is introduced. A toolset which can be used to build expert systems in a way that enhances intelligibility and productivity in knowledge acquistion and system construction is described. The power of these ideas is illustrated by paying special attention to a high level language called DSPL. A description is given of how it was used in the construction of a system called MPA, which assists with planning in the domain of offensive counter air missions