Core curriculum, general education and other nostrums

What should American educators aim at accomplishing in the closing years of the twentieth century? Everybody agrees that major changes are desirable, but the proposal that is most widely discussed and that is being pushed by Bloom, Bennett and other secular theologians of a right-wing persuasion -- to resusitate "general education," alternatively "core curriculum," alternatively again "the liberal arts" -- would make matters worse, not better. It would be seriously dysfunctional in our proletaritized, polyglot society

Roles, role modulations and differential moral assessment of role performance

This paper is a further development of the second section of Social Science Working Paper Number 410. I argue here that disagreements over how well or how ill someone has performed in some social role are affected by a widespread tendency to confuse public and private roles. Those who assess performance in a given role by the standards appropriate for private roles will never agree with those who assess the same performance by the standards appropriate for public roles. I illustrate this thesis by examining differing evaluations of a number of typical policy decisions. While I do not expect that this discussion will terminate all such disagreements, I hope it may help disputants to understand what it is they are disagreeing about

Does moral philosophy rest on a mistake?

I have expropriated the title of Prichard's 1912 paperl because, I too answer his question affinnatively. But the mistake I detect is not the one Prichard thought he had uncovered, and his article is a classic example of the mistake I propose to discuss. It is to believe, as some moral philosophers still appear to do, that moral philosophy has a special domain or special method that distinguishes it in some important way from sociology, anthropology, psychology and economics. I shall argue that these moral philosophers are misled by the "philosophical" vocabulary they use

Grounds for Argument: Local Understandings, Science, and Global Processes in Special Forest Products Harvesting

In posing the question Where are the pickers? , Love and Jones suggest that the shifting paradigm in forestry is real and that academia is not leading the shift. Love and Jones illustrate the emergence of special forest products\u27 legitimacy in competing uses of forests with their experience and research in mushroom harvesting in the Pacific Northwest

Efficiency and Productivity Analysis in Regulation and Governance

This paper surveys the application of efficiency and productivity analysis to recent regulatory experience, especially in Europe. From a review of regulatory case studies, particularly of network industries, it is clear that regulatory practice differs from theoretical precedent in choice of methodology, sample size, model specification and price or revenue control implementation. A principal-agent model of linear regulatory contracts is used to understand this discrepancy, suggesting that efficiency and productivity analysis has been used to capture economic rent rather than to provide incentives for efficiency. Predictions of the model are used to investigate other assumptions in efficiency and productivity analysis.regulation, data envelopment analysis, stochastic frontier analysis.

A joint probability approach to flood frequency estimation using Monte Carlo simulation

In the UK, flood estimation using event based rainfall–runoff modelling currently assigns pre-defined design values to the input variables which control the size of the flow events, apart from the rainfall magnitude which is treated as a random variable. The use of design values, rather than allowing the variables to be described by their full probability distribution, is a practical simplification but may lead to biases in the output flood magnitudes. The present study simulates a large number of flow events using sets of input variables from distributions fitted to observed event data, taking into account seasonality. These simulated datasets are used for running a rainfall-runoff model, and a frequency analysis is applied to the peaks of the output flow hydrographs. The simulated inputs are the rainfall intensity and duration, and the soil moisture deficit (SMD) and initial river flow at the beginning of the rainfall event. An inter-event arrival time is simulated so that a series of events is obtained. The initial conditions of SMD and river flow of each event are made dependent on the (simulated) time elapsed since the previous event, and on the SMD at the end of the previous event

A sum-product theorem in function fields

Let $A$ be a finite subset of \ffield, the field of Laurent series in $1/t$ over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$. We show that for any $\epsilon>0$ there exists a constant $C$ dependent only on $\epsilon$ and $q$ such that $\max\{|A+A|,|AA|\}\geq C |A|^{6/5-\epsilon}$. In particular such a result is obtained for the rational function field $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$. Identical results are also obtained for finite subsets of the $p$-adic field $\mathbb{Q}_p$ for any prime $p$.Comment: Simplification of argument and note that methods also work for the p-adic