Rudeness and Rapport: Insults and Learning Gains in Peer Tutoring

Abstract. For 20 years, researchers have envisioned artificially intelligent learning companions that evolve with their students as they grow and learn. However, while communication theory suggests that positivity decreases over time in relationships, most tutoring systems designed to build rapport with a student remain adamantly polite, and may therefore inadvertently distance the learner from the agent over time. We present an analysis of high school friends interacting in a peer tutoring environment as a step towards designing agents that sustain long-term pedagogical relationships with learners. We find that tu-tees and tutors use different language behaviors: tutees express more playful-ness and face-threat, while tutors attend more to the task. This face-threat by the tutee is associated with increased learning gains for their tutor. Additionally, a small sample of partners who were strangers learned less than friends, and in these dyads increased face-threat was negatively correlated with learning. Our findings support the idea that learning companions should gradually move to-wards playful face-threat as they build relationships with their students

The fine structure of the comparative

The paper provides evidence for a more articulated structure of the comparative as compared with the one in Bobaljik (2012). We propose to split up Bobaljik's cmpr head into two distinct heads, C1 and C2. Looking at Czech, Old Church Slavonic and English, we show that this proposal explains a range of facts about suppletion and allomorphy. A crucial ingredient of our analysis is the claim that adjectival roots are not a-categorial, but spell out adjectival functional structure. Specifically, we argue that adjectival roots come in various types, differing in the amount of functional structure they spell out. In order to correctly model the competition between roots, we further introduce a Faithfulness Restriction on Cyclic Override, which allows us to dispense with the Elsewhere Principle

Second Order Perturbations in the Randall-Sundrum Infinite Brane-World Model

We discuss the non-linear gravitational interactions in the Randall-Sundrum single brane model. If we naively write down the 4-dimensional effective action integrating over the fifth dimension with the aid of the decomposition with respect to eigen modes of 4-dimensional d'Alembertian, the Kaluza-Klein mode coupling seems to be ill-defined. We carefully analyze second order perturbations of the gravitational field induced on the 3-brane under the assumption of the static and axial-symmetric 5-dimensional metric. It is shown that there remains no pathological feature in the Kaluza-Klein mode coupling after the summation over all different mass modes. Furthermore, the leading Kaluza-Klein corrections are shown to be sufficiently suppressed in comparison with the leading order term which is obtained by the zero mode truncation. We confirm that the 4-dimensional Einstein gravity is approximately recovered on the 3-brane up to second order perturbations.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, comment and reference added, typos correcte

Government intervention and financial sector development

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‘Minilateral’ development banks: what the rise of Africa's trade and development bank says about multilateral governance

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) are one of the most popular forms of international organization, with at least 27 operating in the world today. Although most academics and policy makers focus on the World Bank and major regional MDBs, the majority of MDBs are in fact relatively small, and controlled by developing as opposed to industrialized countries. How do the differing governance arrangements of these ‘minilateral’ development banks (MnDBs) impact their operations? This article takes the Trade and Development Bank (TDB), an MDB in Africa with 22 regional member countries, as a case study to consider this question. Based on an analysis of TDB's track record since 2005 and interviews with management and shareholders, the author finds that borrower‐led governance leads to substantial disadvantages in terms of access to finance. Borrower‐led governance permits TDB and other MnDBs greater operational flexibility, which partially compensates for this financial disadvantage, but these operational strategies come with trade‐offs in terms of developmental effectiveness. The findings suggest that MnDBs have substantial latent potential and, in an increasingly multipolar world, they are likely to grow in coming years. However, MnDBs need to ensure that their developmental value added is strengthened in step with their financial power