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The current study examined the relationship between interest, the home environment, and young Chinese children’s development of English as a second/foreign language in Hong Kong. Two hundred and seventy-four Hong Kong kindergartners were assessed on their interest in learning English and their English language skills (i.e., expressive and receptive vocabulary). Their parents completed questionnaires eliciting family socio-economic status, parental beliefs, and home learning environment. The results indicated that (1) interest was related to children’s English language abilities after controlling for children’s gender, non-verbal intelligence, and kindergarten type; (2) parents’ beliefs about their child’s English ability and self-efficacy were related to children’s interest in learning English; and (3) interest uniquely contributed to children’s English language ability in the home environment. The present findings provide evidence of the active role that children play in their second/foreign language development and highlight the significant influence of parental beliefs on children’s interest in learning English.
Basic concepts in finance are introduced and modelled via first-order recurrence equations. In particular, we discuss compound interest, present value and the present value of an annuity.
Chapter 2 presents the conceptual transformation of republicanism that Rousseau operated while responding to Montesquieu’s challenges. In his writings, republicanism moved from an elitist theory based on virtuous self-sacrifice to an inclusive theory based on popular sovereignty and the rational interest of citizens. Rousseau developed a theory of republican citizenship as a shared intention toward creating and maintaining a community of free and equal beings—an inclusive theory of sharing freedom. Yet Rousseau’s theory has important shortcomings that plagued French republicanism after him. On the one hand, it presented a rational project of sharing equal freedom among all, but on the other, it emphasized particularism and nationalism as conditions of its realization.
This article deals with the relevance of video art and filmic techniques for the phenomenological method by thematizing how slow-motion scenes can be used in the analysis of gestures. Drawing on Edmund Husserl's theory of image consciousness, I argue that while, for the empirical researcher, slow motion is a non-analogizing moment that helps the researcher observe the positional image subject, for the phenomenologist, it depicts a different, neutralized image subject that serves as an initial example. This approach leads to further insights revealing a specific form of disappointment of our passively constituted patterns of anticipation concerning the pace of gestural interaction.
Product graphics interchange formats (GIFs) employ this format to show the features of the product and make up for the lack of physical experience online. These GIFs have been widely applied in domains such as e-shopping and social media, aiming to interest and impress viewers. Contrary to this wide application, most designers in this domain lack expertise and produce GIFs of varied quality. Moreover, the knowledge of techniques to enhance viewers’ engagement with product GIFs is also lacking. To bridge the gap, we conducted a series of studies. First, we collected and summarized seven design factors referring to existing literature and semi-structured interviews. Then, the impacts of these design factors were revealed through an online study with 106 product GIFs among 307 participants. The results showed that visual-related factors such as color contrast and moving intensity mainly impact viewers’ interest, while content-related factors such as scenario and style matching impact viewers’ impressions. The simplicity of GIFs also impressed viewers with a quick viewing mode. Finally, we conducted a workshop and verified that these results support large-scale production of product GIFs. Our studies might support the codesign methods of product GIFs and enhance their quality in design practice.
There is a great deal of varied terminology used to refer to cultural heritage, and this chapter explores how definitions of these terms translate into practice the importance of cultural heritage to communities that care about it. At times the UK’s system of law and non-law instruments can lead to a fragmented approach to caring for cultural heritage. In addition, there is a body of jurisprudence where a cultural heritage object, place or practice is at the centre of the dispute, but where general legal principles (rather than specialist cultural heritage laws) are applicable; it is the way in which the judges in these cases construct notions of cultural heritage which present an opportunity to fully appreciate the way in which the UK, as a community, imagines cultural heritage. Concepts such as value, significance, interest, importance, uniqueness and value all demonstrate the recognition of the varied ways in which communities in the UK care about cultural heritage. Although the importance of cultural heritage to a community’s identity is frequently cited, this concept is rarely, if ever, translated into legal or non-legal instruments in the UK. This chapter explores how the relationships between different communities and cultural heritage have been translated into the various nested practices of care.
In Chapter 6, we elaborate on the difficulties that may arise in perspective taking. These depend on individual, contextual, and textual variables. Among the individual factors are motivation, cognitive skills and capacities, and empathic dispositions. Variations in the situation and context, such as available information and feedback, can affect perspective taking. Specific difficulties include: the failure to identify relevant personal knowledge and experience, inconsistent and conflicting perspectives, problems reconciling a character’s perspective with the reader’s own evaluations, and/or the relationship of the reader’s cultural background to that of the character. Subtleties in the text, such as multiple perspectives, unreliable perspectives, and multiple perspective-taking targets, pose their own challenges.
Designers in the real world must adhere to cost and schedules, pay attention to the competition, and work in multidisciplinary teams. Their products are typically the result of incremental, rather than radical, innovation. A questionnaire on how design thinking influences organizational outcomes revealed that four beneficial practices were to form diverse teams, generate diverse ideas, emphasize active listening, and execute real-world experiments. Curiosity, interest, and a drive for sense-making drive motivation, which can be measured by the Motivation to Innovate Inventory. Innovation requires risks and thus a balance between taking and reducing risks. Both traditional and foresight forecasting reduce risks, although the foresight perspective is more uniquely suited to the current complexity of world events. Technical and scientific progress contributes to success, but the process of innovation must be analyzed within a complete system that depends not only on the product but on the market environment, production facilities, knowledge, and social support within the organization.
Zakat returned to Middle Eastern political discourse in the 1930s, through modern Islamism. It became one of two concrete initiatives distinguishing an Islamic modern economy from economies ostensibly corrupted by secularists and colonialists. The other was Islamic finance. In both cases, the focus was more on the symbolism of Islamizing a secularized sphere than on solving actual economic problems. Islamism tacitly stripped zakat of all but one of its original functions: poverty alleviation. Sidelining zakat’s role in public finance and the protection of property rights, it frittered away golden opportunities to draw from Islam’s rich history universal lessons for economic progress and rule of law. Focusing on the functions that made zakat a pillar of Islam would have initiated a dialogue with secularists inclined to dismiss Islam as a source of backwardness. A similar scenario has played out in relation to Islamic finance. Nowhere has a categorical ban on interest, which is absent from the Quran anyway, been enforced. In any case, it is unfeasible. In making Islamic finance seem interest-free through euphemisms and accounting tricks, Islamism reduces economic transparency and institutionalizes dishonesty. Weakening rule of law, it also compounds mistrust.
Emphasizing readers’ perspectives on the demonstrations that they are developing, Chapter 6 opens by asking readers to describe a time when a phenomenon in their topic area awed or puzzled or amused them. Using reminders of what a free-choice setting is, this chapter emphasizes the importance in such settings of generating an audience’s interest and excitement. As advertisers do, science communicators benefit from quickly accessing positive emotions. Fun, intrigue, and coherence are some ways to do that. The chapter recommends that readers go back to basics by focusing demonstrations on the classic phenomena that all theoretical perspectives agree on; this avoids current and complex debates. The Worked Example finds the basics in a highly technical article on sentence structure in Mayan languages, then uses the Star Wars character Yoda to show one way to illustrate these basics that might be interesting to and accessible for nonexperts.
Chapter 14 opens by asking readers to produce several nouns to label an unusual object and then to describe their demonstration’s main activity in several ways. The chapter describes research with K-12 science classes showing learning boosts when concepts are taught before new terms for the concepts and that students are more interested when such terms are minimized. Jargon is the ultimate in new information, so spotting it is a critical first step toward clearer and more effective demonstrations. Strategies for jargon spotting are exemplified: words with Latin or Greek etymology (e.g., "pharyngeal"), acronyms (e.g., "SVO" for subject-verb-object), ambiguous words with both general and specialized meanings (e.g., "stress"). Many experts new to public engagement find it hard to avoid jargon. A demonstration on syntactic ambiguity shows that it can even be done with esoteric or abstract topics. Thus, while jargon is one of the tools of science, incomplete is not incorrect. The Worked Example discusses an online text editor’s markup of a draft sentence. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to aim such an editor to the written support for their demonstration.
From the late archaic period, all the functions of money – medium of exchange, measure of value, store of value, and medium of payment – were performed by coins, almost always silver, struck by scores of states on a few different weight standards. Market trade, international commerce, and labor were all mediated by money. Finance was an important, and often decisive, factor in statecraft and warfare, and temples were both dependent upon and replete with silver and gold. Agriculture was less monetized; cultural effects are still being debated. Credit was an essential part of both friendship and business: mortgages and eranoi (joint loans by an ad hoc group of lenders) supplied extraordinary personal expenses, while small market loans and larger bottomry loans for overseas expeditions financed both large and small commerce. Banking, in the sense of investing depositors’ money, was a Greek invention. Athenian banks, always family businesses, provided credit, remote payments, money-changing, and a secure place to hide money. Ptolemaic royal banks managed royal revenue and were involved, alongside private bankers, in the local economy; cashless book-transfers were common. The scope of banking was, however, limited by the need for coin reserves, which kept the banks from dominating the economy.
Edited by
Irene Cogliati Dezza, University College London,Eric Schulz, Max-Planck-Institut für biologische Kybernetik, Tübingen,Charley M. Wu, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Germany
Information-seeking research emerges from separate traditions focusing on one-time information-seeking behavior (research on curiosity), and long-term task engagement (research on interest). However, these lines of research have been developed independently, and there has been little discussion as to how they can be understood in an integrative manner. Here we present a general framework (the reward-learning framework of knowledge acquisition) that provides a more comprehensive understanding of information-seeking behavior, effectively linking these two research traditions. This framework is based on existing reward-learning models that account for one-time information-seeking behavior, but extends them to explain its long-term development by incorporating the key role of knowledge accumulation.
Understanding individuals’ interest, motivation, and engagement is essential to designing for meaningful learning. We typically think of engaged learners as those who have a more developed interest in content (e.g., math, robotics, swimming) and are motivated to learn. But learners who are not engaged or who are unmotivated can also be assisted to meaningfully engage with content in ways that lead to deep learning. This chapter summarizes research on two questions for how to design for meaningful learning: What supports unmotivated individuals to become motivated to learn? How do we design tasks that enable those who are already engaged to continue to deepen their interest? The chapter summarizes five research studies that provide converging evidence that designing for meaningful learning requires (1) addressing the differences in learners’ interest, motivation, and engagement; (2) supporting learners in engaging in thinking about content with others. Learning environments can be designed to enable all learners, regardless of their initial engagement with material, to develop meaningful connections to content, thus optimizing their learning.
Economics takes the view from the present. But as people become affluent, they care more for the future, which is what government provides for. In the twentieth century, government has grown faster than the economy, and even Conservative governments have failed to wind it down. The reason is that markets take the short view and cannot provide for the future on their own. Before the nineteenth century, interest was seen as usury, rent as parasitical, and profit as exploitation. In response, the neoclassical economics of the 1870s came to the defence of privilege: property was legitimate, interest and profit were the cost of patience, the reward for capitalist energy and enterprise. Markets were the natural order, government and taxes parasitical. Since the 1980s governments have embraced markets as enterprising, innovative, efficient, superior. But privatisation, deregulation, and outsourcing have not fulfilled their promise. Government has not gone away. An outline of the book concludes.
It is often said that jazz is the only true American art form. It is also probably the least consumed genre of music in America.
Of course, some people do like jazz. They will tap their feet and snap their fingers when they hear Duke Ellington. They may note, with fondness, how much they love Dizzy Gillespie. They may even read a think piece on how Norah Jones brought a mixture of jazz and pop into the mainstream of American music.
This chapter summarizes research and theory concerned with the effect of learner motivation and emotional states on multimedia learning. It describes trends and issues in the current approaches, identifies relevant theoretical models, and assesses the importance of motivation (including interest, intrinsic-extrinsic motivation, goal orientation, and self-efficacy) and affect (including positive and negative affective states) as mediators and moderators of the effects of multimedia learning on cognitive outcomes. The reviewed empirical findings indicate the strong influence of multimedia learning environments on learner motivation and affect.
Grotius recast Aristotelian theories of human sociability in terms of self-preservation.Religious war in Europe had undermined the Thomist notion of mutual human affection as a basis for society.If society was established by the need to survive, then justice, which maintained society, must be understood in terms of its contribution to that necessity.Grotius therefore resolved the Ancient Roman and Greek problem of how to reconcile justice and expedience by reinterpreting justice in terms of expedience.For an individual, or state, to act out of self-preservation was necessarily just.His fusion of justice and expedience was one reason he was insistent upon distancing his thought from the Academic Sceptics, such as Carneades, who argued that there was no such thing as justice and that all moral action was expedient.For Grotius, part of the law of self-preservation was the necessity for individuals to secure the means for self-preservation and this meant that the acquisition of property, and trade, were central parts of that process.These principles applied also to the artificial person of the state which found itself in competition for survival with other states.The expansion of the state was therefore justifiable for its preservation.Indeed, following this reasoning, empire effectively became a necessity, and an inevitability, for the survival of European states.