Educating International Security Practitioners: Preparing to Face the Demands of the 21st Century International Security Environment

The authors examine the challenges of the 21st century international security environment to which future strategic leaders and policy practitioners will need to respond. More specifically, they offer the reader insights into security studies and leadership development at their respective levels (military undergraduate, civilian undergraduate, traditional and nontraditional graduate, and senior military officer) and institutions (including research centers and professional outreach programs). The goal is to inform a broader audience about what is currently being done in the way of educating strategic practitioners at these various institutions, and what might need to be done differently or better.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1835/thumbnail.jp

Effects of issue and poll news on electoral volatility: conversion or crystallization?

In the last decades, electoral volatility has been on the rise in Western democracies. Scholars have proposed several explanations for this phenomenon of floating voters. Exposure to media coverage as a short-term explanation for electoral volatility has of yet been understudied. This study examines the effect of media content (issue news and poll news) on two different types of vote change: conversion, switching from one party to another, and crystallization, switching from being undecided to casting a vote for a party. We use a national panel survey (N = 765) and link this to a content analysis of campaign news on television and in newspapers during national Dutch elections. Findings reveal that exposure to issue news increases the chance of crystallization, whereas it decreases the chance of conversion. Conversely, exposure to poll news increases the chance of conversion, whereas it decreases the chance of crystallization

The role of partial knowledge in statistical word learning

A critical question about the nature of human learning is whether it is an all-or-none or a gradual, accumulative process. Associative and statistical theories of word learning rely critically on the later assumption: that the process of learning a word’s meaning unfolds over time. That is, learning the correct referent for a word involves the accumulation of partial knowledge across multiple instances. Some theories also make an even stronger claim: Partial knowledge of one word–object mapping can speed up the acquisition of other word–object mappings. We present three experiments that test and verify these claims by exposing learners to two consecutive blocks of cross-situational learning, in which half of the words and objects in the second block were those that participants failed to learn in Block 1. In line with an accumulative account, Re-exposure to these mis-mapped items accelerated the acquisition of both previously experienced mappings and wholly new word–object mappings. But how does partial knowledge of some words speed the acquisition of others? We consider two hypotheses. First, partial knowledge of a word could reduce the amount of information required for it to reach threshold, and the supra-threshold mapping could subsequently aid in the acquisition of new mappings. Alternatively, partial knowledge of a word’s meaning could be useful for disambiguating the meanings of other words even before the threshold of learning is reached. We construct and compare computational models embodying each of these hypotheses and show that the latter provides a better explanation of the empirical data