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Selected AbstractsDewey's Conception of an Environment for Teaching and LearningCURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 3 2002David T. Hansen In this article, I examine the main contours of John Dewey's conception of an environment for teaching and learning. I show how his conception derives from two components of his philosophical anthropology: (1) his understanding of the nature of a growing self, and (2) his view of how human beings influence one another. With this background in place, I examine why Dewey argues that an environment for teaching and learning should be what he calls "simplified, purified, balanced, and steadying." I discuss how Dewey distinguishes an educative environment from what he calls "surroundings." Finally, I address why he argues that teachers should not focus directly on learning, but rather on the environment that obtains in the classroom. Throughout the article, I try to show how timely and powerful Dewey's conception of an environment remains,for teachers, teacher educators, and all who care about meaningful teaching and learning. [source] Fair Value Accounting and the Financial Crisis: Messenger or Contributor?,ACCOUNTING PERSPECTIVES, Issue 3 2009Michel L. Magnan ABSTRACT This commentary discusses how fair value accounting (FVA) affects the nature of financial reporting, especially for financial institutions that were deeply affected by the 2007-9 financial crisis. Toward that end, I address four questions. First, I review FVA's role in financial reporting, emphasizing its development over time. While the commentary's focus is on the interface between financial instruments and FVA, its reach extends well beyond financial instruments. Thereafter, I discuss the measurement and valuation challenges that arise from the use of FVA in financial reporting. Then, I analyze the evidence, analytical and empirical, on the role that FVA may have played in the financial crisis of 2007-9. Since, to some extent, the crisis is still unfolding, there is limited yet very insightful empirical evidence on this issue. The evidence does suggest that FVA, in combination with its use by regulators, may have severely undermined the financial condition of some institutions. The effect was amplified for institutions holding assets in markets that saw their liquidity dry up during the crisis. In other words, FVA may have amplified the crisis. Finally, I discuss some implications that we can draw from the crisis about the merits and risks underlying FVA. For instance, I conclude that, in a search for relevance, the use of FVA in financial reporting may accelerate its disconnection from a firm's business reality. [source] Monetary Policy Design: Institutional Developments from a Contractual PerspectiveINTERNATIONAL FINANCE, Issue 3 2000Carl E. Walsh Twenty years ago, most industrialized economies were just starting the costly process of disinflation. There was little consensus that these disinflations would be successful, or that low inflation once achieved could be maintained. While the USA achieved low inflation without changing its policy making institutions, many other countries did reform their central banking institutions, making them more independent of political influences. In this paper, I address three questions. First, is independence enough? Second, how do the details of an institution's structure translate, through their impact on incentives, into different policy outcomes? And third, can institutions serve as commitment mechanisms? [source] Did Futures Markets Stabilise US Grain Prices?JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2002Joseph Santos Though economists are divided over whether, in practice, futures markets reduce spot price volatility, observers of nascent nineteenth century US futures markets essentially praised the stabilising effects of this financial innovation. Indeed, such praise is understandable, particularly if, as the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) and others assert, "violent" spot price fluctuations were common prior to, but not after, the 1870s; the same decade that grain trade historians typically associate with the birth of the modern futures contract. And whereas these events may be unrelated, the claim is intriguing because it requires that nineteenth century futures prices fulfil their price discovery function, a property that many modern futures markets do not possess. This paper explores what role, if any, the advent of futures trading may have had on spot price volatility. I corroborate the CBOT's assertion regarding diminished spot price volatility around the 1870s and show that early futures prices did indeed fulfil their price discovery function. Moreover, I address two alternative hypotheses that relate the decline in spot price volatility to the Civil War. Ultimately, I maintain that the evolution of futures markets is the principal proximate reason why commodity spot price volatility diminished. [source] On the Meaning of Words and Dinosaur Bones: Lexical Knowledge Without a LexiconCOGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 4 2009Jeffrey L. Elman Abstract Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words,with primary interest on rules,this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is representationally rich, that it is the source of much productive behavior, and that lexically specific information plays a critical and early role in the interpretation of grammatical structure. But how much information can or should be placed in the lexicon? This is the question I address here. I review a set of studies whose results indicate that event knowledge plays a significant role in early stages of sentence processing and structural analysis. This poses a conundrum for traditional views of the lexicon. Either the lexicon must be expanded to include factors that do not plausibly seem to belong there; or else virtually all information about word meaning is removed, leaving the lexicon impoverished. I suggest a third alternative, which provides a way to account for lexical knowledge without a mental lexicon. [source] | ||||||||||