Symposium on rationality and commitment: introduction

In his critique of rational choice theory, Amartya Sen claims that committed agents do not (or not exclusively) pursue their own goals. This claim appears to be nonsensical since even strongly heteronomous or altruistic agents cannot pursue other people's goals without making them their own. It seems that self-goal choice is constitutive of any kind of agency. In this paper, Sen's radical claim is defended. It is argued that the objection raised against Sen's claim holds only with respect to individual goals. Not all goals, however, are individual goals; there are shared goals, too. Shared goals are irreducible to individual goals, as the argument from we-derivativeness and the argument from normativity show. It is further claimed that an adequate account of committed action defies both internalism and externalism about practical reason

A Taxonomy of Attribute Scoring Functions

Shifting the analysis from items to the granularity of attributes is a promising approach to address complex decision-making problems. In this work, we study attribute scoring functions (ASFs), which transform values from data attributes to numerical scores. As the output of ASFs for different attributes is always comparable and scores carry user preferences, ASFs are particularly useful for analysis goals such as multi-attribute ranking, multi-criteria optimization, or similarity modeling. However, non-programmers cannot yet fully leverage their individual preferences on attribute values, as visual analytics (VA) support for the creation of ASFs is still in its infancy, and guidelines for the creation of ASFs are missing almost entirely. We present a taxonomy of eight types of ASFs and an overview of tools for the creation of ASFs as a result of an extensive literature review. Both the taxonomy and the tools overview have descriptive power, as they represent and combine non-visual math and statistics perspectives with the VA perspective. We underpin the usefulness of VA support for broader user groups in real-world cases for all eight types of ASFs, unveil missing VA support for the ASF creation, and discuss the integration of ASF in VA workflows

Social democracy in Europe 4.0

International audienceIn 1983, after a coalition of centre-rights (Kohl) and liberals (Genscher) pushed the social democrats (Brandt, Schmidt) out of government, German-British sociologist Lord Ralf Dahrendorf concluded: "We are witnessing the end of the social-democratic century in the OECD world." 1 He argued-as many others believed at that time-that the social democratic project had solved with bravery the great "social question" of reducing the poverty and social inequality imposed by the industrial area. "In a way," he even announced, "we (almost) all became Social Democrats" by taking for granted its basic institutions, such as the rule of law and (more or less) universal social security against the risk of health, old age and unemployment. Yet, he maintained, all the underlying assumptions or promises of social democracy-growth, labour, equality, rationality, state, and internationalism-no longer hold. Social democracy had no answers to the questions of the 21st century: growth and work had come to an end, more equality was not financeable, religious and other a-rational beliefs had risen up again, the state systematically failed, and nationalism was rising up again. Liberalism would be the proper response, i.e. the promise of self-determination, individual responsibility, freedom of movement, and so on. In hindsight, we know that neoliberal pundits, particularly mainstream economists, transformed these vague assumptions and visions into the hardcore ideology of unfettered markets, in particular deregulated labour and capital markets

Determining the economic gains from regulation at the extensive and intensive margins

Among the second-best approaches for the regulation of pollution, little attention has been paid to the distorting effect of intensive margin policies on the extensive margin. This article shows, within a dynamic framework, that regulation of the intensive margin has to be complemented by regulation of the extensive margin. Depending on the elasticity of the pollution function with respect to nitrogen use, the appropriate regulation at the extensive margin is zero, a tax or a subsidy. We show empirically that combining a nitrogen tax with land-use taxes is about 18 per cent more cost efficient than a nitrogen tax alone and 58 per cent more efficient than off-site abatement in the form of groundwater treatmen

A Meta-Analysis of Teacher and Student-Centered Practices and Processes in Undergraduate Science Education

This meta-analysis investigates the effects of four instructional dimensions rated on a scale from more Teacher-centered (T-C) to more Student-centered (S-C) plus several coded moderator variables on the achievement of undergraduate students in science education courses. More student-centered conditions served as the ‘treatment’ while more teacher-centered conditions were considered the ‘control.’ Hedges’ g, operationalized as the adjusted standardized differences between treatment and control means, served as the outcome measure. The weighted average difference between groups was g̅ = 0.34, k = 140 (random effects analysis), indicating an overall difference in favor of student-centered instruction. Out of four rated dimensions (Pacing, Teacher’s Role, Flexibility, and Adaptation) only Flexibility was significant in metaregression as a negative predictor of effect size. Two demographic variables (i.e., class size & subject matter), and one instructional moderator variables (i.e., technology use) were also significant when added to Flexibility, producing a model that accounted for 36% of total variation in effect size

Sozialdemokratie in Europa 4.0

International audienc

An exploration of bias in meta-analysis: the case of technology integration research in higher education

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York. This article contains a second-order meta-analysis and an exploration of bias in the technology integration literature in higher education. Thirteen meta-analyses, dated from 2000 to 2014 were selected to be included based on the questions asked and the presence of adequate statistical information to conduct a quantitative synthesis. The weighted random effects average was g++ = 0.393, p \u3c .000. The article goes on to report an assessment of the methodological quality of the thirteen studies based on Cooper’s (Research synthesis and meta-analysis: a step-by-step approach. Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2010) seven stages in the development of a meta-analysis. Two meta-analyses were found to have five out of seven stages where methodological flaws could potentially create biased results. Five meta-analyses contained two flawed stages and one contained one flawed stage. Four of the stages where methodological flaws can create bias are described in detail. The final section attempts to determine how much influence the methodological flaws exerted on the results of the second-order meta-analysis