For many educators, the phrase ‘from distance education to e-learning’ conjures up the view of an ‘evolutionary’ progression beginning with correspondence study and developed through more sophisticated technologies to its current identification with computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. For others, particularly those with little knowledge or experience of (and often equally little in...

A few years ago, I attended a 1-day symposium on long distance transport at a national meeting in a country abroad. Towards the end of the day, as the participants became tired and no general agreement was in sight, one observer from an allied discipline remarked, "Why can't you translocation workers make any progress, you still discuss the same miserable old models that were proposed 40 years ...

Quantum tunneling between two potential wells in a magnetic field can be strongly increased when the potential barrier varies in the direction perpendicular to the line connecting the two wells and remains constant along this line. A periodic structure of the wave function is formed in the direction joining the wells. The resulting motion can be coherent like motion in a conventional narrow ban...

Ordering and disordering electrons When a liquid is cooled rapidly, it can form a glass, a state stuck between liquid and solid. Two groups looked in detail into analogous dynamics in electronic systems. Sato et al. and Sasaki et al. studied layered organic materials with a triangular in-plane lattice. These materials can assume a state in which their charge distribution has a regular pattern—a...

Two questions regarding the non-local nature of long-distance agreement in consonantal harmony patterns (Hansson 2001, Rose and Walker 2004) are addressed: (1) How can such patterns be learned from surface forms alone? (2) How can we understand a a major feature of the typology—the absence of blocking effects? It is shown that a learner which generalizes only by making distinctions with respect...

above-ground biomass and a 20-fold increase in plant cover by Artemesia frigida, a common shrubby plant of some North American and Asian grasslands. This carbon dioxide induced enhancement of plant growth, among the highest so far reported, provides evidence from a native grassland that rising carbon dioxide levels since the onset of industrial times may have been contributing to the observed s...