Consider Fritz, who is nowadays a happy resident of Saarbrücken. On sunny Saturdays, Fritz has the habit of barbecuing Bratwurst with his friends in his yard and going thereafter to his local, the Nächstestrasse Biergarten, ‘NB’ for short. Fritz may have a couple of beers while eating his Bratwurst at home, but nothing which compares to the amount he will drink thereafter at the beer garden. Th...

Traditionally different approaches to the study of cognition have been viewed as competing explanatory frameworks. An alternative view, explanatory pluralism, regards different approaches to the study of cognition as complementary ways of studying the same phenomenon, at specific temporal and spatial scales, using appropriate methodological tools. Explanatory pluralism has been often described ...

This book buys into the current trend of structuring every and any target-oriented interpersonal interaction in education, ongoing education and on-the-job training along competency boundaries. More than anything else, key competency has become a slogan that dominates every program and renders colorless any conventional educational approaches, which are oriented on knowledge, ability and ethos....

In a classroom, obtaining active, whole-focused, and engaging learning results from a design is often difficult. In this study, we propose a self-observation model that employs an instinctive interface for classroom active learning. Students can communicate with virtual avatars in the vertical screen and can react naturally according to the situation and tasks. Students can also immediately obs...

In this paper we will describe the results of an experiment in which an effective communication system arises among a collection of initially non-communicating agents through a self-organization process based on an evolutionary process. Evolved agents communicate by producing and detecting five different signals that affect both their motor and signaling behavior. These signals identify feature...

Considerable academic effort is being expended in considering how to regulate various activities on the internet, particularly those as relate to obscene material, breaches of privacy and challenges to intellectual property rights. Post and Johnson (1997) offer the following solution which is typical; 'We believe that the most obvious answer to this question -existing territorial sovereigns -ma...

Recent works in the context of self-organisation foster the idea of engineering large-scale situated systems by taking an aggregate stance: system design and development are better conducted by abstracting away from individuals’ details, rather directly engineering (designing, programming, verifying) the overall system behaviour, as if it were executed on top of a single, continuous-like machin...

Despite radical improvements in medicine over the past 60 years, patients maintain multiple health care pathways that include high utilization of unconventional treatments. The authors examine three possible relationships between mainstream and alternative medicine: opposition, integration, and pluralism. Opposition, the traditional ethical position that the medical profession must eradicate un...

There is a continuing discussion on methodological pluralism in IS research. Several claims have been made both for and against methodological pluralism. The debate focuses mainly on discussing the relationship between research methods and IS research paradigms, especially positivism and interpretivism. Also, the literature analyzes the epistemological assumptions of research paradigms, but pay...