Seit der Einfuhrung des Europaischen Portfolios der Sprachen (EPS) im Jahr 2001 ist dem Portfolio ein starkes Potenzial zur Veranderung der Lernkultur im Fremdsprachenunterricht zugeschrieben worden. Die quantitative empirische Studie untersucht die Wirksamkeit der Portfolioimplementierung sowie das Modifikationspotenzial des EPS aus der Sicht von Lehrkraften. Der niedersachsische Modellversuch zur Einfuhrung des EPS wird evaluiert und die Untersuchungsergebnisse zur Bildung eines Modells fur die Implementierung herangezogen. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich, dass das Innovationspotenzial des EPS nur wirken kann, wenn Lehrkrafte Veranderungen auf den Ebenen der Organisation sowie der Lern- und Gesprachskultur vornehmen.

Brian Hedden defends a radical view about the relationship between rationality, personal identity, and time. On the standard view, personal identity over time plays a central role in thinking about rationality. This is because, on the standard view, there are rational norms for how a person's attitudes and actions at one time should fit with her attitudes and actions at other times, norms that apply within a person but not across persons. But these norms are problematic. They make what you rationally ought to believe or do depend on facts about your past that aren't part of your current perspective on the world, and they make rationality depend on controversial, murky metaphysical facts about what binds different instantaneous snapshots (or 'time-slices') into a single person extended in time. Hedden takes a different approach, treating the relationship between different time-slices of the same person as no different from the relationship between different people. For purposes of rational evaluation, a temporally extended person is akin to a group of people. The locus of rationality is the time-slice rather than the temporally extended agent. Taking an impersonal, time-slice-centric approach to rationality yields a unified approach to the rationality of beliefs, preferences, and actions where what rationality demands of you is solely determined by your evidence, with no special weight given to your past beliefs or actions.

When making decisions, people naturally face uncertainty about the potential consequences of their actions due in part to limits in their capacity to represent, evaluate or deliberate. Nonetheless, they aim to make the best decisions possible. In Decision Theory with a Human Face, Richard Bradley develops new theories of agency and rational decision-making, offering guidance on how 'real' agents who are aware of their bounds should represent the uncertainty they face, how they should revise their opinions as a result of experience and how they should make decisions when lacking full awareness of, or precise opinions on relevant contingencies. He engages with the strengths and flaws of Bayesian reasoning, and presents clear and comprehensive explorations of key issues in decision theory, from belief and desire to semantics and learning. His book draws on philosophy, economics, decision science and psychology, and will appeal to readers in all of these disciplines.

* How is science represented by the media?
* Who defines what counts as a risk, threat or hazard, and why?
* In what ways do media images of science shape public perceptions?
* What can cultural and media studies tell us about current scientific controversies?
Media, Risk and Science is an exciting exploration into an array of important issues, providing a much needed framework for understanding key debates on how the media represent science and risk. In a highly effective way, Stuart Allan weaves together insights from multiple strands of research across diverse disciplines. Among the themes he examines are: the role of science in science fiction, such as Star Trek; the problem of 'pseudo-science' in The X-Files; and how science is displayed in science museums. Science journalism receives particular attention, with the processes by which science is made 'newsworthy' unravelled for careful scrutiny. The book also includes individual chapters devoted to how the media portray environmental risks, HIV-AIDS, food scares (such as BSE or 'mad cow disease' and GM foods) and human cloning. The result is a highly topical text that will be invaluable for students and scholars in cultural and media studies, science studies, journalism, sociology and politics.

Studieren, Lehren und Forschen basieren heute weitgehend auf dem Einsatz neuer Medien. Dabei werden das Sehen und das Klicken mit der Maus als Selbstverstandlichkeit vorausgesetzt. Man nimmt an, dass alle in normaler Schrift Dokumente lesen koennen. Wie koennen aber Menschen mit visueller Beeintrachtigung bei den stark auf Visualisierung ausgerichteten Lernprozessen wirklich partizipieren? Das Ziel der Arbeit ist es, Einblicke in komplexe Barrieren in der visuellen Bildungslandschaft zu geben. Der Fokus liegt auf Interaktionsprozessen zwischen sehenden und nicht (gut) sehenden Lernenden. Wichtige Sachaspekte werden vermittelt und didaktische Elemente reflektiert. Im Rahmen einer Aktionsforschung werden am Beispiel der Universitat Zurich moegliche Loesungswege aufgezeigt.

In einem perspektivverschrankenden Ansatz untersuchen die Autorinnen und der Autor die polyvalenten Wirkungen von Bildungsurlaub. Ausserdem befassen sie sich mit den durch die Gesetzesanderung evozierten Steuerungseffekten auf der Ebene der Anbieter und Angebote. Es werden daruber hinaus die professionellen Handlungsmodi der Programmplanung untersucht und die Interessens- und Verwertungszusammenhange der Teilnehmenden. Hintergrund ist die Tatsache, dass es in Deutschland nur wenige gesetzliche Regelungen gibt, die ein Recht des Einzelnen auf Weiterbildung sichern. Ein besonderes Beispiel sind die Landesgesetze zum Bildungsurlaub (auch Bildungsfreistellungsgesetze). Das Bundesland Bremen hat sein Bildungsurlaubsgesetz im Jahre 2010 novelliert und versucht die Teilnahmequote zu erhoehen, indem es das Spektrum an Bildungsurlaubsanbietern und Veranstaltungsformaten ausdifferenziert und erweitert.

This book, based on the author's Clarendon Lectures in Finance, examines the empirical behavior of corporate default risk. A new and unified statistical methodology for default prediction, based on stochastic intensity modeling, is explained and implemented with data on U.S. public corporations since 1980. Special attention is given to the measurement of correlation of default risk across firms. The underlying work was developed in a series of collaborations over roughly the past decade with Sanjiv Das, Andreas Eckner, Guillaume Horel, Nikunj Kapadia, Leandro Saita, and Ke Wang. Where possible, the content based on methodology has been separated from the substantive empirical findings, in order to provide access to the latter for those less focused on the mathematical foundations.
A key finding is that corporate defaults are more clustered in time than would be suggested by their exposure to observable common or correlated risk factors. The methodology allows for hidden sources of default correlation, which are particularly important to include when estimating the likelihood that a portfolio of corporate loans will suffer large default losses. The data also reveal that a substantial amount of power for predicting the default of a corporation can be obtained from the firm's "distance to default," a volatility-adjusted measure of leverage that is the basis of the theoretical models of corporate debt pricing of Black, Scholes, and Merton. The findings are particularly relevant in the aftermath of the financial crisis, which revealed a lack of attention to the proper modelling of correlation of default risk across firms.

The concept of rationality is a common thread through the human and social sciences -- from political science to philosophy, from economics to sociology, and from management science to decision analysis. But what counts as rational action and rational behavior?
Jose Luis Bermudez explores decision theory as a theory of rationality. Decision theory is the mathematical theory of choice and for many social scientists it makes the concept of rationality mathematically tractable and scientifically legitimate.
Yet rationality is a concept with several dimensions and the theory of rationality has different roles to play. It plays an action-guiding role (prescribing what counts as a rational solution of a given decision problem). It plays a normative role (giving us the tools to pass judgment not just on how a decision problem was solved, but also on how it was set up in the first place). And it plays a predictive/explanatory role (telling us how rational agents will behave, or why they did what they did).
This controversial but accessible book shows that decision theory cannot play all of these roles simultaneously. And yet, it argues, no theory of rationality can play one role without playing the other two. The conclusion is that there is no hope of taking decision theory as a theory of rationality.

The Handbook of Rational and Social Choice provides an overview of issues arising in work on the foundations of decision theory and social choice over the past three decades. Drawing on work by economic theorists mainly, but also with contributions from political science, philosophy and psychology, the collection shows how the related areas of decision theory and social choice have developed in their applications and moved well beyond the basic models of expected utility and utilitarian approaches to welfare economics.
Containing twenty-three contributions, in many cases by leading figures in their fields, the handbook shows how the normative foundations of economics have changed dramatically as more general and explicit models of utility and group choice have been developed. This is perhaps the first time these developments have been brought together in a manner that seeks to identify and make accessible the recent themes and developments that have been of particular interest to researchers in recent years. The collection will be of particular value to researchers in economics with interests in utility or welfare but it will also be of interest to any social scientist or philosopher interested in theories of rationality or group decision-making.