Cepiah: a method for the design and evaluation of pedagogical hypermedia

CEPIAH is a method and a proposal for a Web‐based system to be used to assist teachers in designing multimedia documents and in evaluating their prototypes. The proposed tool integrates two modules: one for the Evaluation of Multimedia Pedagogical and Interactive software (EMPI), and the other, a method for designing pedagogical hypermedia (SP/UL/FC). The two modules are presented along with applications of distance teaching (and distance learning) and with comments about the first results of this experiment. A short presentation of a third module serves as a conclusion.     

Human-aligned artificial intelligence is a multiobjective problem

As the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems improve, it becomes important to constrain their actions to ensure their behaviour remains beneficial to humanity. A variety of ethical, legal and safety-based frameworks have been proposed as a basis for designing these constraints. Despite their variations, these frameworks share the common characteristic that decision-making must consider multiple potentially conflicting factors. We demonstrate that these alignment frameworks can be represented as utility functions, but that the widely used Maximum Expected Utility (MEU) paradigm provides insufficient support for such multiobjective decision-making. We show that a Multiobjective Maximum Expected Utility paradigm based on the combination of vector utilities and non-linear action–selection can overcome many of the issues which limit MEU’s effectiveness in implementing aligned AI. We examine existing approaches to multiobjective AI, and identify how these can contribute to the development of human-aligned intelligent agents.     

Writing from the archive: Henry Garnet’s powder-plot letters and archival communication

Through a reading of the archived letters of Henry Garnet (1555–1606), Superior of the Jesuit order in England and suspected Gunpowder plotter, this article investigates the nature of the archive in relation to narrative theory. Figuring the archive as one of the number of narrating voices accrued by the individual record, I argue that models of communication such as those put forward by Roman Jakobson, Wayne C. Booth and Seymour Chatman afford useful insights into the ways in which power is inscribed and reinscribed in the record through successive acts of reading and rewriting.

Examining the structure of vocational interests in Turkey in the context of the personal globe model

The structural validity of the Personal Globe Inventory-Short (PGI-S: Tracey in J Vocat Behavi 76:1–15, pan class="CitationRef">2010pan>) was examined in a Turkish sample of high school and university students. The PGI-S measures eight basic interest scales, Holland’s (Making vocational choice, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, pan class="CitationRef">1997pan>) six types, Prediger’s (J Vocat Behav 21:259–287, pan class="CitationRef">1981pan>) people/things, data/ideas dimensions, and prestige. After adapting the original PGI-S items into Turkish (PGI-S-T), the inventory was administered to high school students (N = 605) and university students (N = 359). The fit of Holland’s RIASEC and the PGI eight type model were examined separately using the randomization test of hypothesized order relations. Results indicated a strong fit for both the eight type and the RIASEC model. Expected significant differences were found between PGI-S-T subscales across gender and age. The results support the structural validity of the adapted PGI-S-T in a Turkish sample.     

Community of practice and metacapabilities

Continuous reinvention of the organization through learning is a key feature of knowledge management (KM). Responsive change requires the development of organizational structures, processes and cultures that foster the capability to create and learn new knowledge, while abandoning dated knowledge and business processes no longer appropriate to the business environment. The business drivers of past success risk promoting complacency and failure to adapt responsively to environmental change, making the strategic quality of continuous responsive adaptive change a critical and elusive business success factor. On-going adaptability requires the learning and synthesis of a set of capabilities, or metacapabilities that contribute the kinds of skills and knowledge that underlie the process of change and core competency building. Merging metacapabilities with a value chain-specific core competency will allow all three strategic qualities – value creation, difficult to imitate and responsive adaptive change – to be satisfied. In very complex and dynamic environments management should pay consideration to the structures that facilitate the development of a learning culture capable of redefining functions and organizational purpose in response to the environmental changes. What is required is a learning structure that allows for the questioning of the organizational paradigm relative to the business environment, stimulates and supports the development of metacapabilities while providing the larger aligning supportive context that is process focused at a system level. Community of practice, a key KM application, may be one potentially useful metaphor for describing such a structure.     

The societal impact of the emerging quantum technologies: a renewed urgency to make quantum theory understandable

This paper introduces the special issue The societal impact of the emerging quantum technologies as a contribution to a more inclusive societal debate on quantum technologies. It brings together five contributions. Three are authored by quantum technology researchers who give explorations of the possible impacts of quantum technologies on science, industry and society. The fourth contribution discusses within the framework of responsible research and innovation, the ways in which quantum technologies and the societal debate about them are presented in European policy documents. The final contribution analyses how the popularisation of quantum theory for wider audiences has evolved, and can be improved, with the emergence of quantum technologies. This introduction is also a call for a renewed effort to make quantum theory understandable. A preamble to a societal debate about quantum technologies is that all stakeholders understand these technologies to a reasonable degree, and the current framing of quantum theory as enigmatic in not helpful to meeting this. It is argued that philosophers of physics can help overcome this framing by explaining how quantum theory and quantum technologies are similar to every-day descriptions and technologies.     

The Vice: Some Historically Inspired and Proof-Generated Steps to Limits of Sequences

This paper proposes a genetic development of the concept of limit of a sequence leading to a definition, through a succession of proofs rather than through a succession of sequences or a succession of εs. The major ideas on which it is based are historical and depend on Euclid, Archimedes, Fermat, Wallis and Newton. Proofs of equality by means of inequalities precede the notion of limit. For example, the determination of the volume of a pyramid precedes the definition of limit. The algebraic details given here are anachronistically modern, and the notion of a vice between two inequalities which provides the distinctive perspective of this paper would not have been recognized in this form by any of the named mathematicians since it presumes the existence of negative numbers and their comparability in a modern sense with positive numbers.