Automatic thematic classification of election manifestos

We digitized three years of Dutch election manifestos annotated by the Dutch political scientist Isaac Lipschits. We used these data to train a classifier that can automatically label new, unseen election manifestos with themes. Having the manifestos in a uniform XML format with all paragraphs annotated with their themes has advantages for both electronic publishing of the data and diachronic comparative data analysis. The data that we created will be disclosed to the public through a search interface. This means that it will be possible to query the data and filter them on themes and parties. We optimized the Lipschits classifier on the task of classifying election manifestos using models trained on earlier years. We built a classifier that is suited for classifying election manifestos from 2002 onwards using the data from the 1980s and 1990s. We evaluated the results by having a domain expert manually assess a sample of the classified data. We found that our automatic classifier obtains the same precision as a human classifier on unseen data. Its recall could be improved by extending the set of themes with newly emerged themes. Thus when using old political texts to classify new texts, work is needed to link and expand the set of themes to newer topics.     

Reflections on religious nationalism,conflict and schooling in developing democracies: India and Israel in comparative perspective

This article explores the relationship between the propagation of religious nationalist citizenship discourses in classrooms and inter‐religious conflict in the context of two developing democracies, India and Israel. The author concludes that students schooled in religious nationalist ideology in developing nations are at greater risk of accepting exclusionary citizenship discourses without adequate critical analyses of their implications due to poor nations' tendencies toward teacher‐centred and textbook‐based instruction that neglects the development of critical thinking faculties. The acceptance of these ideologies appears to be correlated with an increase in inter‐religious conflict, social destabilization and the subversion of democracy. The corruption of democratic ideals by religiously motivated citizenship discourses has however been partially offset by the power of the vote and other structures inherent in democracy.     

Does Academia Still Call? Experiences of Academics in Germany and the United States

Minerva - Given the significant transformations underway in academia, it is pertinent to ask whether the traditional notion of entering the profession in response to a calling is still relevant....     

Indigenizing civic education in Africa: Experience in Madagascar and the Sahel

In Africa, as in many countries of the South, democratization is sometimes perceived as a process modeled upon outside – and specifically Northern – experience. Formal civic education programs in those countries arguably reflect the same bias and have not always been notably successful. Yet there are rich patterns of civic involvement and democratic process in African culture and in the myriad ways in which it has adapted to development challenges, often more successfully reflected in non-formal and informal education endeavors. This article reports on a comparative study of related experience in Madagascar and Sahelian West Africa and draws conclusions regarding ways to draw inspiration for school-based civic education from such ground-level sources.     

Nature as relationship partner: an old frame revisited

Language use that embodies a mechanistic, instrumental view of nature contributes to the environmental predicament. This paper argues that interpersonal relationships can be applied as suitable analogies and metaphors for human–nature relationships. To show that such reframing is necessary and possible, we used the Google Ngram Viewer to study how often expressions from different frames of nature were used in English language books between 1800 and 2008. As the language use of scientific publications is directly related to formal education, a similar analysis was conducted using the Scopus scientific database for 1993–2012. After presenting our numerical results, we explain why the interpersonal relationship frame is environmentally appropriate and widely applicable. It is pointed out that in both human–human and human–nature relations, complex systems are connected, change is constant, stress is unavoidable, and multiple dynamic equilibria exist. Moreover, a number of analogous psychological defense mechanisms are used, which can lead to similar systemic problems, such as unrealistic expectations, growing distance, and exploitation in the relationship. In light of these similarities, relevant theoretical and empirical results are re-examined. It is shown that the relationship frame can help understand and bring about the cognitive and behavioral changes required to improve human–nature relationships.     

Engineering Courses Taught in Foreign Languages in Hungary

Engineering courses provided in English at different technical universities were meant to satisfy the urgent demand of the 1980s in Hungary. The English programme of the Technical University of Budapest (TUB) was established fairly soon after its foundation in 1984; German, French and Russian programmes succeeded the pilot one 8 years later. The compatibility of all the four projects with counterpart national curricula is bilaterally guaranteed. The present paper aims to give an overview of different engineering education programmes available for foreign students at the International Center for Engineering Programmes (ICEP) of the TUB. The coexistence of different types of engineering education within the same institution provides unique experiences of difficulties and benefits that, undoubtedly, might be utilized internationally.     

A Case of Inconsistent Equatings: How the Man With Four Watches Decides What Time It Is

A simultaneous equating of four new test forms to each other and to one previous form was accomplished through a complex design incorporating seven separate equating links. Each new form was linked to the reference form by four different paths, and each path produced a different score conversion. The procedure used to resolve these inconsistencies was applied separately at each score level. Considering each equating (at a given score level) as a simple additive increment and imposing constraints on those increments led to a system of seven equations in seven unknowns. The solution produced a set of adjusted increments, so that the linking of any new form to the reference form was the same by all four possible paths.