Creative Freedom

Undergraduate 2-

Laboratories of Reform: Virtual High Schools and Innovation in Public Education

Virtual schools are growing rapidly, serving over 700,000 students in the 2005-06 school year. But these schools are proving to be more than just another delivery system for students; they are bringing about reforms that have long eluded traditional public schools

Collective action framing genetic engineering resistance in New Zealand

The genetic engineering resistance movement in New Zealand constructed strategic and meaningful interpretations of why the genetic engineering technique is problematic and what can be done about it. There are four central interpretations – explored here as collective action frames – that were used by key movement activists in their mobilisation activities. These four frames describe genetic engineering as ‘involving a wide range of issues’, ‘risky’, ‘unnatural’ and as ‘all about the ownership of life’. The characteristics of these frames are explained in this paper, along with an analysis of why it is that activists were able to achieve widespread resonance through their deployment of them. The successful framing and articulation of movement grievances is a critical movement activity for engagement of civil society in issues of great importance

How to Explain Miscomputation

Just as theory of representation is deficient if it can’t explain how misrepresentation is possible, a theory of computation is deficient if it can’t explain how miscomputation is possible. Nonetheless, philosophers have generally ignored miscomputation. My primary goal in this paper is to clarify both what miscomputation is and how to adequately explain it. Miscomputation is a special kind of malfunction: a system miscomputes when it computes in a way that it shouldn’t. To explain miscomputation, you must provide accounts of computational behavior, computational norms, and how computational behavior can deviate from computational norms. A secondary goal of this paper is to defend an (quasi-)individualist, mechanistic theory of miscomputation. Computational behavior is narrowly individuated. Computational norms are widely individuated. A system miscomputes when its behavior manifests a narrow computational structure that the widely individuated norms say that it should not have