Survey and analysis of the usefulness of the social studies guide for New Hampshire elementary schools

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Bayesian Inference of Social Norms as Shared Constraints on Behavior

People act upon their desires, but often, also act in adherence to implicit social norms. How do people infer these unstated social norms from others' behavior, especially in novel social contexts? We propose that laypeople have intuitive theories of social norms as behavioral constraints shared across different agents in the same social context. We formalize inference of norms using a Bayesian Theory of Mind approach, and show that this computational approach provides excellent predictions of how people infer norms in two scenarios. Our results suggest that people separate the influence of norms and individual desires on others' actions, and have implications for modelling generalizations of hidden causes of behavior.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, to appear in CogSci 2019, code available at https://github.com/ztangent/norms-cogsci1

Ironies of state building: a comparative perspective on the American state

This paper challenges prevailing assumptions about the American State. It rejects the conventional distinctions between strong and weak and activism and inactivism as no longer adequate to the modern reality of the expansive and extensive American State. With this premise, the paper undertakes three tasks. First, it examines the reasons for the scholarly neglect of the State amongst students of American government and politics, concluding that the level of federal activism (including taxing, spending, regulating and war making) observable in respect to both Democrat and Republican administrations renders this oversight unsustainable intellectually and analytically. Second, the paper develops a typology of ways in which the American State has been an effective presence in the US political system including its role in sustaining and then ending segregation, in standardizing national rights of citizenship, and in militarizing society. Last, the paper shows how recent advances in comparative studies of the state, notably with respect to federalism and state-society relations, offer lessons for developing scholarly knowledge of the American State. -- In diesem Arbeitspapier sollen die Annahmen über den amerikanischen Staat überprüft werden, die üblicherweise in der Wissenschaft gemacht werden: Die Unterscheidungen zwischen starkem und schwachem sowie zwischen aktivem und inaktivem Staat werden zurückgewiesen, da sie der heutigen Wirklichkeit eines expandierenden und ausgreifenden amerikanischen Staatswesens überhaupt nicht mehr angemessen sind. Vor diesem Hintergrund leistet das Arbeitspapier ein Mehrfaches: Erstens werden die Gründe dafür geprüft, warum die Forscher, die sich mit der US-amerikanischen Regierung und Politik befassten, den Staat so stark vernachlässigt haben. Dabei wird festgestellt, dass ein steigendes Niveau von Bundesaktivitäten das schließt Steuern, Ausgaben, Gesetzgebung und Kriegsführung ein - sowohl unter demokratischen wie republikanischen Präsidentschaften zu beobachten ist, sich diese Achtlosigkeit also intellektuell wie analytisch nicht rechtfertigen lässt. Zweitens wird in diesem Arbeitspapier eine Typologie der effektiven Präsenz des amerikanischen Staates im US-Politiksystem entwickelt, was dessen Rolle bei der Unterstützung wie der Beendigung der Rassentrennung, beim Durchsetzen nationaler Bürgerrechtsstandards und bei der der Militarisierung der Gesellschaft einschließt. Drittens wird gezeigt, wie jüngste Fortschritte in der vergleichenden Staatswissenschaft - vornehmlich bezogen auf den föderalen Staatsaufbau und die Beziehungssysteme zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft - Impulsgeber für die Weiterentwicklung des Wissens zum amerikanischen Staat sein können.

Bistability through triadic closure

We propose and analyse a class of evolving network models suitable for describing a dynamic topological structure. Applications include telecommunication, on-line social behaviour and information processing in neuroscience. We model the evolving network as a discrete time Markov chain, and study a very general framework where, conditioned on the current state, edges appear or disappear independently at the next timestep. We show how to exploit symmetries in the microscopic, localized rules in order to obtain conjugate classes of random graphs that simplify analysis and calibration of a model. Further, we develop a mean field theory for describing network evolution. For a simple but realistic scenario incorporating the triadic closure effect that has been empirically observed by social scientists (friends of friends tend to become friends), the mean field theory predicts bistable dynamics, and computational results confirm this prediction. We also discuss the calibration issue for a set of real cell phone data, and find support for a stratified model, where individuals are assigned to one of two distinct groups having different within-group and across-group dynamics

Indian evangelical mission, 1960-1990 : an examination Tyagigargha or the way of sacrifice as a model for mission along the Indian roa

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1741/thumbnail.jp

Arawakan (Brazil) morphosyntax

From the introduction: The purpose of this study is to present some of the major morphosyntactic characteristics of eight Arawakan languages spoken in Brazil. [...] The five areas of morphosyntax which are treated in tern in the following sections are: word order, case marking, verb morphology, coordination, and subordination. As will be seen in section 3, much of the morphosyntactic complexity of these languages is found in the verb, and certain phenomena that in other languages would be dealt with in other parts of the syntax are treated in that section, including: valence-changing devices such as causatives, passives and reflexives; negation; and gender agreement; for each of these, the discussion is extended to cover related aspects of the syntax, wherever the sources provide material for this

Are Cariban languages moving away from or towards ergative systems?

From the introduction: In this paper [...] I will be arguing for a direction of change in Cariban languages from systems that are purely ergative in both nominal case marking and verb agreement patterns (and which are probably of considerable antiquity) to mixed systems where in main clauses the core nominals are not marked at all and the verb agreement patterns are a mixture of nominative and absolutive, based on an agentivity-person hierarchy. Subordinate clauses take the form of nominalizations that retain characteristics of the older pure ergative system