Instructional technology, and the cognitivist and systems paradigms that underpin it, grew out of the military-industrial complex during the Cold War. Much as the Pentagon and this military complex defined the architecture of the Internet, they also essentially created, ex nihilo, the fields of instructional technology and instructional design. The results of the ongoing dominance or influence ...

A scientist living in Russia is often asked two questions: “Why haven’t you left?” and “Is it still possible to work there?” The best response to the fi rst question is, “Why should I?”—which either terminates the conversation or leads to a stimulating discussion about the fate of the world. The second question, however, deserves a serious answer. In fact, this is the question that every one of...

The importance of consumer confidence in stimulating economic activity is a disputed issue in macroeconomics. Do changes in confidence represent autonomous fluctuations in optimism, independent of information on economic fundamentals, or are they a reflection of economic news? I study this question by using high-frequency microdata on spending and consumer confidence, and I find that consumer c...

For 1990–2019, this study presents two-step GMM estimates of EU members’ demands for defense spending based on alternative spatial-weight matrices. In particular, spatial connectivity is tied to membership status, contiguity, contiguity and power projection, inverse distance, arms trade. At a Nash equilibrium, our demand equations are derived explicitly from spatially game-theoretical model all...

The fundamental attack against blockchain systems is the double-spend attack. In this tutorial, we provide a very detailed explanation of just one section of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original paper where the attack’s probability of success is stated. We show the derivation of the mathematics relied upon by Nakamoto to create a model of the attack. We also validate the model with a Monte Carlo simulat...

This study aims to examine the effect of investment and consumption spending on Indonesia’s economic growth. The data used is the quarterly time series data from the first quarter of year 2003 to the fourth quarter of year 2013, comprising consumption spending, investment and economic growth. For the purpose of analysis, the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model is used. The result of the...

Two strains of Bacillus, B. cereus E41 and B. anthracis F34, were isolated from a salt lake in Aïn M'lila-Oum El Bouaghi, eastern Algeria, and Ain Baida-Ouargla, southern Algeria, respectively. Their genomes display genes for the production of several bioactive secondary metabolites, including polyhydroxyalkanoate, iron siderophores, lipopeptides, and bacteriocins.