This book gathers together novel essays on the state-of-the-art research into the logic and practice of abduction. In many ways, abduction has become established and essential to several fields, such as logic, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy of science, and methodology. In recent years this interest in abduction's many aspects and functions has accelerated. There are evidently several different interpretations and uses for abduction. Many fundamental questions on abduction remain open. How is abduction manifested in human cognition and intelligence? What kinds or types of abduction can be discerned? What is the role for abduction in inquiry and mathematical discovery? The chapters aim at providing answer to these and other current questions. Their contributors have been at the forefront of discussions on abduction, and offer here their updated approaches to the issues that they consider central to abduction's contemporary relevance. The book is an essential reading for any scholar or professional keeping up with disciplines impacted by the study of abductive reasoning, and its novel development and applications in various fields.

Edited by David Schwarzer, Montclair State University, Mary Petron, Sam Houston State University, and Christopher Luke, Ball State University A volume in Research in Second Language Learning JoAnn Hammadou Sullivan, Series Editor "Research Informing Practice-Practice Informing Research: Innovative Teaching Methodologies for World Language Educators" is an edited volume that focuses on innovative, nontraditional methods of teaching and learning world languages. Using teacher-research projects, each author in the volume guides readers through their own personal journey and exploration of teaching methods, novelty, risk-taking, and reflection. Chapters include guiding questions, vignettes, and thick descriptions of classroom-based research in an assortment of instructional settings. Theoretical issues and an array of practical applications are presented, as well as additional research opportunities and guidelines for implementation in a variety of teaching and learning venues. While not professing to be a panacea for world language learning, this book provides various lines of theory, research, and practice as they interact with each other through teacher-research narratives. As a well-known African proverb asserts, "It takes a village to raise a child." Similarly, it takes a village to develop a master teacher, and it takes a community to create an exceptional classroom. Throughout this volume, authors share their voices, experiences, and expertise as a means of strengthening the village. They then invite readers to embark on their own methodological journeys. The text thus serves as a stimulus for further discussion and pedagogical development in world language settings. Teachers and researchers are challenged to think critically and reflectively about world language education, encouraged to design innovative methods, approaches, and techniques for their world language classes, and ultimately asked to share their findings with students, parents, peers, communities, and the village.

This book offers a new look at well-established quantification theory for categorical data, referred to by such names as correspondence analysis, dual scaling, optimal scaling, and homogeneity analysis. These multiple identities are a consequence of its large number of properties that allow one to analyze and visualize the strength of variable association in an optimal solution. The book contains modern quantification theory for analyzing the association between two and more categorical variables in a variety of applicative frameworks. Visualization has attracted much attention over the past decades and given rise to controversial opinions. One may consider variations of plotting systems used in the construction of the classic correspondence plot, the biplot, the Carroll-Green-Schaffer scaling, or a new approach in doubled multidimensional space as presented in the book. There are even arguments for no visualization at all. The purpose of this book therefore is to shed new light on time-honored graphical procedures with critical reviews, new ideas, and future directions as alternatives. This stimulating volume is written with fresh new ideas from the traditional framework and the contemporary points of view. It thus offers readers a deep understanding of the ever-evolving nature of quantification theory and its practice. Part I starts with illustrating contingency table analysis with traditional joint graphical displays (symmetric, non-symmetric) and the CGS scaling and then explores logically correct graphs in doubled Euclidean space for both row and column variables. Part II covers a variety of mathematical approaches to the biplot strategy in graphing a data structure, providing a useful source for this modern approach to graphical display. Part II is also concerned with a number of alternative approaches to the joint graphical display such as bimodal cluster analysis and other statistical problems relevant to quantification theory.

This book focuses on critical issues and perspectives concerning globally mobile students, aspects that have grown in importance thanks to major geopolitical, economic, and technological changes around the globe (i.e., in and across major origins and destinations of international students). Over the past few decades, the field of international higher education and scholarship has developed robust areas of research that guide current policy, programs, and pedagogy. However, many of the established narratives and wisdoms that dominate research agendas, scope, and foci have become somewhat ossified and are unable to reflect recent political upheavals and other changes (e.g. the Brexit, Trump era, and Belt and Road Initiative) that have disrupted a number of areas including mobility patterns and recruitment practices, understanding and supporting students, engagement of global mobile students with their local counterparts, and the political economy of international education at large. By re-assessing established issues and perspectives in light of the emerging global/local situations, the contributing authors - all experts on international education - share insights on policies and practices that can help adapt to emerging challenges and opportunities for institutions, scholars, and other stakeholders in international higher education. Including theoretical, empirical, and practitioner-based methods and perspectives provided by scholars from around the world, the book offers a unique and intriguing resource.

A volume in International Social Studies Forum: The Series Series Editors Richard Diem, University of Texas at San Antonio and Jeff Passe, Towson University With the national push towards inclusion, more students with disabilities are being placed in general education settings. Furthermore, when placed, more students with disabilities are entering social studies classrooms than any other content area. Classroom teachers are being asked to "reach and teach" all students, often with little support. There are numerous texts on the teaching of social studies, an equal number on teaching students with disabilities. Blending best practice in social studies and special education instruction, this book provides both pre - and in-service educators simple, practical strategies that support the creation of engaging, relevant, and appropriate social studies opportunities for all students. Though the strategies presented are useful for all students, they are particularly beneficial for students with disabilities. From Universal Design for Learning, mnemonics, graphic organizers, and big ideas, to co-teaching, screen readers and the Virtual History Museum, this book offers hands-on, practical ideas general educators can use when teaching K-12 social studies in inclusive classrooms.

This book shows how information theory, probability, statistics, mathematics and personal computers can be applied to the exploration of numbers and proportions in music. It brings the methods of scientific and quantitative thinking to questions like: What are the ways of encoding a message in music and how can we be sure of the correct decoding? How do claims of names hidden in the notes of a score stand up to scientific analysis? How many ways are there of obtaining proportions and are they due to chance? After thoroughly exploring the ways of encoding information in music, the ambiguities of numerical alphabets and the words to be found "hidden" in a score, the book presents a novel way of exploring the proportions in a composition with a purpose-built computer program and gives example results from the application of the techniques. These include information theory, combinatorics, probability, hypothesis testing, Monte Carlo simulation and Bayesian networks, presented in an easily understandable form including their development from ancient history through the life and times of J. S. Bach, making connections between science, philosophy, art, architecture, particle physics, calculating machines and artificial intelligence. For the practitioner the book points out the pitfalls of various psychological fallacies and biases and includes succinct points of guidance for anyone involved in this type of research. This book will be useful to anyone who intends to use a scientific approach to the humanities, particularly music, and will appeal to anyone who is interested in the intersection between the arts and science.With a foreword by Ruth Tatlow (Uppsala University), award winning author of Bach's Numbers: Compositional Proportion and Significance and Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet."With this study Alan Shepherd opens a much-needed examination of the wide range of mathematical claims that have been made about J. S. Bach's music, offering both tools and methodological cautions with the potential to help clarify old problems." Daniel R. Melamed, Professor of Music in Musicology, Indiana University

A volume in International Research on School Leadership Series Editors Alan R. Shoho and Bruce Barnett, University of Texas at San Antonio and Autumn Tooms, University of Tennessee This book series, International Research on School Leadership focuses on how present-day issues affect the theory and practice of school leadership. For the inaugural book, we focused on the challenges facing new principals and headteachers. Because the professional lives of school leaders have increasingly impinged on their personal well-being and resources have continued to shrink, it is important to understand how new principals or headteachers share and divide their energy, ideas, and time within the school day. It is also important to discover ways to provide professional development and support for new principals and headteachers as they strive to lead their schools in the twenty-first century. For these reasons, The Challenges for New Principals in the Twenty-First Century: Developing Leadership Capabilities Through Professional Support is dedicated to exploring the rarely-examined experiences of those who enter the role as new principals or headteachers. By giving voice to new principals and headteachers, we are able to determine what aspects of leadership preparation ring true and what aspects prove to be of little or no utility. Unlike leadership texts that focus on conceptual considerations and personal narratives from the field, this book highlights a collection of empirical efforts centered on the challenges and issues that new principals and headteachers experience during their initial and crucial years of induction. We solicited and accepted manuscripts that explore the multi-faceted dimensions of being a new principal or headteacher in the twenty-first century. Our goal was to create an edited book that examines the commonalities and differences that new principals and headteachers experience from an international perspective. This edited book is comprised of six chapters, each of which contributes an unique perspective on the responsibilities that new principals and headteachers are experiencing at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Choice Modelling is a technique that has recently emerged as a means of estimating the demand for environmental goods and the benefits and costs associated with them. The aims of the book are fourfold: * to introduce the technique in the environmental context * to demonstrate its use in a range of case studies * to provide insights into some methodological issues * to explore the prospects for the technique. The authors contributing to the book show that choice modelling offers considerable potential for the evaluation of environmental goods and services. Its flexibility to cope with a wide range of applications is well demonstrated. The technique also presents numerous challenges to practitioners. A number of these are addressed in the book. Informed and innovative, this book will prove indispensable to all scholars, researchers and practitioners in the areas of environmental studies and environmental economics.

This book focuses on the use of the Rasch measurement model in validation studies and in analyzing the psychometric properties of a variety of test instruments, questionnaires, and scales in international contexts. It broadly examines the development and application of Rasch modeling, providing in-depth analyses of the properties of various scales used in the fields of education, and humanities and social sciences research. The book includes exemplary works on educational research and practices that highlight recent and innovative applications, as well as theoretical and practical aspects of Rasch modeling. Readers will find it helpful to understand the latest approaches to Rasch measurement in educational research, as well as practices for future studies and quantitative research. 'This book provides a diverse set of perspectives on Rasch models from scholars across the globe. The volume is both theoretical and applied. The first section of the book provides an overview of Rasch modeling and explains the theoretical and conceptual framework underlying the Rasch model. The remainder of the book highlights multiple applications of the Rasch model within educational assessment as well as several examples of how Rasch modeling can be used for validation studies. This volume showcases the wide variety of ways in which Rasch modeling can be applied to assessment data to provide insights into students' achievement and learning and to improve instruction.'-Betsy McCoach, University of Connecticut, USA. 'A well-written collection of articles. Grouped by the theoretical and applied aspects of Rasch measurement, each chapter in this edited volume makes notable contributions to knowledge and practice. Written by leading scholars in the field, these chapters were written in a clear, succinct, and assertive manner, providing readers with up-to-date information, analyses, and debates. This book should be found in the core collection of emerging researchers and established scholars in educational measurement.'-Timothy Teo, Murdoch University, Australia.

Entrepreneurial Competition and Industrial Location explores the notion of entrepreneurial competition from its theoretical foundations in early Austrian and contemporary evolutionary economics. Focusing on the structural development of the intangible factors of production such as labour skills, advertising and research and development, the book's empirical implications are tested in a comparative study of competitive performance in the EU, Japan and the USA. Typical mechanisms of external spillovers, shaping industrial location by means of Marshallian cluster formation, highlight the dimension of industrial location. Peneder finally employs the three evolutionary principles of variation, cumulation and selection to establish entrepreneurship, learning and fair markets as the main pillars of modern competitiveness policy. This volume paves the way for a better understanding of the market process, demonstrating the importance of intangible factors as sources of competitive advantage both by conclusive theoretical argument and careful empirical investigation.

This book covers the essential concepts and strategies within traditional and cutting-edge feature learning methods thru both theoretical analysis and case studies. Good features give good models and it is usually not classifiers but features that determine the effectiveness of a model. In this book, readers can find not only traditional feature learning methods, such as principal component analysis, linear discriminant analysis, and geometrical-structure-based methods, but also advanced feature learning methods, such as sparse learning, low-rank decomposition, tensor-based feature extraction, and deep-learning-based feature learning. Each feature learning method has its own dedicated chapter that explains how it is theoretically derived and shows how it is implemented for real-world applications. Detailed illustrated figures are included for better understanding. This book can be used by students, researchers, and engineers looking for a reference guide for popular methods of feature learning and machine intelligence.

Putting the anthropological imagination under the spotlight, this book represents the experience of three generations of researchers, each of whom have long collaborated with the same Indigenous community over the course of their careers. In the context of a remote Indigenous Australian community in northern Australia, these researchers-anthropologists, an archeologist, a literary scholar, and an artist-encounter reflexivity and ethnographic practice through deeply personal and professionally revealing accounts of anthropological consciousness, relational encounters, and knowledge sharing. In six discrete chapters, the authors reveal the complexities that run through these relationships, considering how any one of us builds knowledge, shares knowledge, how we encounter different and new knowledge, and how well we are positioned to understand the lived experiences of others, whilst making ourselves fully available to personal change. At its core, this anthology is a meditation on learning and friendship across cultures.

This book offers practical advice on designing, conducting and analyzing interviews with 'elite' and 'expert' persons (or 'socially prominent actors'), with a focus on criminology and criminal justice. It offers dilemmas and examples of 'good' and 'bad' practices in order to encourage readers to critically asses their own work. It also addresses methodological issues which include: access, power imbalances, getting past 'corporate answers', considerations of whether or not it is at times acceptable to ask leading questions and whether to enter a discussion with a respondent at all. This book will be valuable to students and scholars conducting qualitative research.

Vital Statistics of the United States: Births, Life Expectancy, Deaths, and Selected Health Data brings together a comprehensive collection of birth, mortality, and health data into a single volume. It provides a wealth of information compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics and other government agencies. Vital Statistics contains over 225 tables and is divided into four parts: Births, Mortality, Health, and Marriage and Divorce. Charts and graphs, available at applicable points in each chapter, illustrate some of the most vital trends in the data. In addition, updated definitions reflect the latest federal parameters for information about births, mortality, health, and marriages.

Where and who do we want to be? How might we get there? What might happen if we stay on our current course? In The Future of Serious Art, Bidisha uses her personal journey through novels, TV and film to mirror the seismic changes that have occurred in culture and its industries in recent years. The digital revolution has brought all of TV, cinema and music into the palms of our hands. It's easier than ever to bring stories to life, but what happens when artistic work is rebranded as 'content creation'? Where does this leave literary novelists and arthouse filmmakers? What about those auteur-directors who make mainstream but thoughtful films for the big screen? As a storyteller herself, and a woman of colour who isn't a millennial, Bidisha asks who is taken seriously as an artist, what is taken seriously as art now and how that might change over the next century. This brief but mighty book is one of five that comprise the first set of FUTURES essays. Each standalone book presents the author's original vision of a singular aspect of the future which inspires in them hope or reticence, optimism or fear. Read individually, these essays will inform, entertain and challenge. Together, they form a picture of what might lie ahead, and ask the reader to imagine how we might make the transition from here to there, from now to then.

This volume demonstrates the ways in which a gender perspective has been incorporated into existing themes and methods of migration research and has also led to the development of new areas of interest. It draws together the most important published articles on gender and migration in North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia in order to highlight major theoretical developments relating to employment, gender relations, household organisation, identity, citizenship, transnationalism and migration policy. In the introduction the editors provide an overview of these key developments in gender and migration research, as well as suggesting topics for future research. Gender and Migration will be a valuable resource for demographers, geographers and gender studies researchers.

A volume in Critical Constructions: Studies on Education and Society Series Editor: Curry Stephenson Malott Education has rarely been absent from local and national public discourse. Throughout the history of modern education spanning more than a century, we have as a culture lamented the failures of public schooling, often making such claims based on assumptions instead of any nuanced consideration of the many influences on teaching and learning in any child's life-notably the socioeconomic status of a student's family. School reform, then, has also been a frequent topic in political discourse and public debate. Since the mid-twentieth century, a rising call for market forces to replace government-run schooling has pushed to the front of those debates. Since A Nation at Risk in the early 1980s and the implementation of No Child Left Behind at the turn of the twenty-first century, a subtle shift has occurred in the traditional support of public education-fueled by the misconception that private schools out perform public schools along with a naive faith in competition and the promise of the free market. Political and ideological claims that all parents deserve school choice has proven to be a compelling slogan. This book unmasks calls for parental and school choice with a postformal and critical view of both the traditional bureaucratic public school system and the current patterns found the body of research on all aspects of school choice and private schooling. The examination of the status quo and market-based calls for school reform will serve well all stakeholders in public education as they seek to evaluate the quality of schools today and form positions on how best to reform schools for the empowerment of free people in a democratic society.

This book introduces readers to the latest advances in and approaches to intuitionistic fuzzy decision-making methods. To do so, it explores a range of applications to practical decision-making problems, together with representative case studies. Examining a host of decision-making methods, most of which are based on intuitionistic fuzzy aggregation operators, its goal is to offer readers a new way to study decision-making methods in the intuitionistic fuzzy environment. Chiefly intended for practitioners and researchers working in the areas of risk management, decision-making under uncertainty, and operational research, the book can also be used as supplementary material for graduate and senior undergraduate courses in these areas.

This book introduces demographic applications which employ current demographic concepts and theories and cutting-edge methods and findings, all of which have and will continue to have an impact in the broad area of social demography. Through providing an introduction to new and current developments in demography, methodological and statistical issues, data issues, issues of health, aging and mortality, and issues in social demography, this book gives new insights into data, substantive issues, and methodological approaches that will assist readers in their use of demography in their research. At the same time it shows demographers, sociologists, economists, statisticians, methodologists, planners, and marketers how they may learn and improve upon the quality and relevance of their demographic investigations now and in the future.