On the Epistemological Basis of Large‐Scale Population Studies and their Educational Use

This paper attempts to take seriously the claim that we can look for causes in order to understand the reality we live (in), and focuses therefore primarily on ‘the natural world’. It will be argued that even if we were to fully endorse the programme of looking for antecedents, a dominant driver for many educational researchers, this would still not solve the problems they commonly set out to address. It will illustrate the problem of contextualisation in using an example of educational research that uses the methodology of the randomised field trial. In these kind of studies the paradigm of causality and its experimental laboratory approach is modified to incorporate the exigencies of real life situations. The claim that these studies too do not put one in a position to derive straightforward conclusions for policy makers or more generally for educational practitioners will be substantiated. Finally, some concluding remarks will be offered that indicate what may be expected from large‐scale population studies and what their epistemological basis is.     

Significant Life Experiences and Formative Influences on the Development of Adults’ Environmental Awareness in the UK,Australia and Canada

Environmental educators in Australia (n = 82), and Canada (n = 48) wrote autobiographical statements describing the formative influences and significant life experiences (SLE) which led to their concern for the environment. Content analysis identified the influences/experiences mentioned most often, both as single factors, e.g. ‘close family’, and as groups of logically related factors, e.g. ‘people’, a group composed of the factors ‘close family’, ‘older friends'’, ‘friends'’, and ‘having children’. The final lists of single factors were similar but not identical in the two countries, and both differed slightly from the list already derived from a sample of environmental educators in the UK (n = 233). Here we present the single and grouped factors named most often in Australia, then do the same for Canada, and then compare the principal factors in all three nations.     

安全网络数学计算协议(英文)

讨论了网络数学计算框架 IAMC的安全性问题,给出了一个用安全协议 SSL/TIS提高数学计算协议MCP安全性的实现方案.改进后的网络数学计算框架可有效地提供计算数据的机密性、完整性和用户认证等安全功能.