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.

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.

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.

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 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 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

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 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.

This book provides the first comprehensive comparative analysis of the emerging civil service systems in 9 Central and East European states. Its comparative nature provides a fascinating insight into the emerging patterns of administrative development in the region since the beginning of the transition period. The authors apply the same methodological framework developed by the Civil Service Research Consortium to all the country case studies, which gives the book a high level of coherence and enhances the comparability of the country case studies. This methodological framework provides a solid background for the in-depth analysis of the history of the civil service system, internal labour market, public opinion, relations between politicians and administrators and civil service reform and development. Special attention is given to topical issues such as the influence of the European Union on the emerging civil service systems and possibility of European Union candidature. Civil Service Systems in Central and Eastern Europe will be warmly welcomed by academics and advanced level students in public administration, law, political science and transition studies as well as policymakers and international organizations helping to develop civil services in former communist countries.

A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences includes essays on the ways in which the histories of psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, history and political science have been written since the Second World War. Bringing together chapters written by the leading historians of each discipline, the book establishes significant parallels and contrasts and makes the case for a comparative interdisciplinary historiography. This comparative approach helps explain historiographical developments on the basis of factors specific to individual disciplines and the social, political, and intellectual developments that go beyond individual disciplines. All historians, including historians of the different social sciences, encounter literatures with which they are not familiar. This book will provide a broader understanding of the different ways in which the history of the social sciences, and by extension intellectual history, is written.

As the need for sustainable development practices around the world continues to grow, it has become imperative for citizens to become actively engaged in the global transition. By evaluating data collected from various global programs, researchers are able to identify strategies and challenges in implementing civic engagement initiatives. Analyzing the Role of Citizen Science in Modern Research focuses on analyzing data on current initiatives and best practices in citizen engagement and education programs across various disciplines. Highlighting emergent research and application techniques within citizen science initiatives, this publication appeals to academicians, researchers, policy makers, government officials, technology developers, advanced-level students and program developers interested in launching or improving citizen science programs across the globe.

"True development, justice and the fulfillment of the maximumeconomic and social potential of Zimbabwe can take place only whendevelopment experts give serious and adequate consideration to the keyroles women play in their economies and societies. While social policyhas improved women's lives in some important ways, it has failed toimprove w omen's poorer economic situation compared to men."

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.

"This is an outstanding contribution to both libertarian political philosophy and communication theory. It is far and away the most comprehensive work on communication issues in libertarian theory ever published. The author has integrated successfully the libertarian insights of Mises, Rothbard, Block, Kinsella and others with the philosophy of language as developed by Austin, Searle and Grice. He has done so in a unique and unprecedented way. The book would appeal to students and scholars interested in libertarian theory and more generally, to philosophers and political scientists interested in high-level scholarship." - David Gordon, libertarian philosopher and intellectual historian, Ludwig von Mises Institute.

This book explores official statistics and their social function in modern societies. Digitisation and globalisation are creating completely new opportunities and risks, a context in which facts (can) play an enormously important part if they are produced with a quality that makes them credible and purpose-specific. In order for this to actually happen, official statistics must continue to actively pursue the modernisation of their working methods. This book is not about the technical and methodological challenges associated with digitisation and globalisation; rather, it focuses on statistical sociology, which scientifically deals with the peculiarities and pitfalls of governing-by-numbers, and assigns statistics a suitable position in the future informational ecosystem. Further, the book provides a comprehensive overview of modern issues in official statistics, embodied in a historical and conceptual framework that endows it with different and innovative perspectives. Central to this work is the quality of statistical information provided by official statistics. The implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in the form of indicators is another driving force in the search for answers, and is addressed here. This book will be of interest to a broad readership. The topics of sociology, epistemology, statistical history and the management of production processes, which are important for official statistics and their role in social decision-making processes, are generally not dealt with in statistics books. The book is primary intended for official statisticians, but researchers and advanced students in statistics, economics, sociology and the political sciences will find the book equally stimulating. Last but not least, it offers a valuable source of reflection for policymakers and stakeholders.

What and how to teach in the K-16 classroom history has been a perennial and, at times, heated debate. Beginning as early as 1892, the question of what knowledge is of the most worth and what should be the central function of the history curriculum became a focus of many interested in education. It was felt that the teachers needed to move away from "traditional" methods of teaching history, such as rote memorization and the "dry and lifeless system of instruction by textbook," and find new and engaging ways to "broaden and cultivate the mind." Unfortunately, these recommendations faced many critics and did not take hold in K-16 classrooms at this time or, frankly, at any point since then. Even though we tend to have a nostalgic memory of earlier time periods and, in turn, the educational capabilities of the children from various times in our nation's past, the results from multiple studies examining the historical knowledge base of America's youth has remained fairly discouraging. Much of the lack of knowledge present stems from the manner in which history is traditionally taught. Ineffective instructional methods greatly impact the interest levels, or more frequently the distaste, generated for learning about historical content and, thus, the public's corresponding perception of the importance of history within K-16 curricula. This book makes an effort at overcoming the persistent boredom and lack of historical knowledge present in our students, by focusing on ways in which history instruction can be improved.

This volume of the Research in Global Child Advocacy Series explores participatory methodologies and tools that involve children in research. Perspectives on the role of children have transitioned from viewing children as objects of research, to children as subjects of research, to acknowledgement of children as competent contributors and agents throughout the inquiry process. Researchers continue to explore approaches that honor the capacity of children, drawing on diverse methodologies to elevate children's voices and actively engage them in the production of knowledge. Nonetheless, despite these developments, questions over the extent to which children can be free of adult filters and influence merits sustained scholarly attention. The book includes chapters that critically examine methodological approaches that empower children in the research process. Contributions include empirical or practitioner pieces that operate from an empowerment paradigm and demonstrate the agenic capacity of children to contribute their perspectives and voices to our understanding of childhood and children's lives. The text also features conceptual pieces that challenge existing theoretical frameworks, critique research paradigms, and analyze dilemmas or tensions related to ethics, policy and power relations in the research process.

This book introduces the reader to the concept of functional synchronization and how it operates on very different levels in psychological and social systems - from the emergence of thought to the formation of social relations and the structure of societies. For years, psychologists have investigated phenomena such as self-concept, social judgment, social relations, group dynamics, and cooperation and conflict, but have discussed these phenomena seoarately.This book shows how synchronization provides a foundational approach to these otherwise distinct and diverse psychological processes.This work shows that there is a basic tendency with many processes to become coordinated and progressively integrated into increasingly larger units through well-defined processes. For these larger units, new and largely adaptive functions emerge. Although synchronization affords progressive integration of system elements to enable correspondingly higher-order functions, the trajectory of synchronization is often characterized by periods of assembly and disassembly of system elements. This occurs when a task is completed and synchronization is no longer essential so that the elements once again operate in an independent fashion. It is argued that the disassembly-resynchronization scenario occurs at all levels of psychological and social reality. The implications of this approach for important issues in interpersonal relations and societal processes are discussed.