Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

Geography and computer ethics: An Eastern European perspective

Several context-specific social and political factors in Eastern and Central Europe are described — factors that must be considered while developing strategies to introduce Computer Ethics. Poland is used as a primary example. GNP per capita, the cost of hardware and software, uneven and scant distribution of computing resources, and attitudes toward work and authority are discussed. Such “geographical factors” must be taken into account as the new field of Computer Ethics develops.     

The relation between subjective distance and emotional involvement: Further experiment

The purpose of this experiment has been to test the value of an exponent of the power function describing the relation between emotional involvement and subjective distance, called the inverse square root law (Ekman and Bratfisch 1965). A group of 113 subjects were instructed to estimate 65 inter-city distances with Opole, Poland, as the center, and, next, to estimate the importance attributed to the cities, their own personal interest in them and involvement to them. The experiment partly confirmed the results obtained in original investigations, that is the inverse square root law holds true for cities of a range of distance not exceeding about 5000 km. For more distant cities a different trend has been observed, namely an increase of emotional involvement with increase of subjective distance to these cities. This might lead to the supposition that the relation between emotional involvement and subjective distance could be described by a parabolic relation.