Showing papers by "David Cohen published in 1988"

Teaching practice : plus ça change

Abstract: Introduction Americans always have been hopeful about education. But they also have been deeply divided about how best to promote it. Horace Mann, Catherine Beecher, and legions of other nineteenth century school boosters were convinced that education would flourish in state-maintained schools. They believed that such schools could turn a rough and divided collection of peoples into a self-governing political community. They worried about urban crime, Irish immigrants, delinquent children, uneducated teachers, and how to teach the political virtues required in a popular democracy--among other things. Some of these school boosters wrote in a sunny, hopeful voice, while others were mean and fretful. Few paid much attention to teaching and learning: They assumed a simple pedagogy, trusting that children would learn what they were taught. Partly because of this last assumption, they saw schools as a powerful creative force. They believed that compulsory public schools could make over an ignorant and unruly people, and thereby redeem a threatened democracy. But many other Americans had a radically different vision of education. James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and other Romantics saw education as a do-it-yourself proposition, carried out alone or with a few friends. They depicted education as an adventure, a collision between untamed impulses and real experience. More often than not, these adventures were played out in tough and lonely struggles to learn the wild country. But if the Romantics attended closely to learning, their conception of teaching was modest. In fact, the only real teachers in this tradition were the learners themselves, as they struggled with an unforgiving nature or unyielding masters. In Twain's lovely story of learning to become a Mississippi riverboat pilot, he notes that while he learned from master pilots, he had no teachers. ____________

Telerobotics: problems and research needs

Abstract: With major emphasis on simulation, a university laboratory telerobotics facility permits problems to be approached by groups of graduate students. Helmet-mounded displays provide realism; the slaving of the display to the human operator's viewpoint gives a sense of 'telepresence' that may be useful for prolonged tasks. Using top-down 3-D model control of distant images allows distant images to be reduced to a few parameters to update the model used for display to the human operator in a preview model to circumvent, in part, the communication delay. Also, the model can be used as a format for supervisory control and permit short-term local autonomous operations. Image processing algorithms can be made simpler and faster without trying to construct sensible images from the bottom. Control studies of telerobots lead to preferential manual control modes and, in this university environment, to basic paradigms for human motion and thence, perhaps, to redesign of robotic control, trajectory path planning, and rehabilitation prosthetics. Speculation as to future industrial drives for this telerobotic field suggests efficient roles for government agencies such as NASA. >

The Prosecution of Impiety in Athenian Law

Abstract: The three preceding chapters have discussed the manner in which Athenian society encompassed two areas of problematic sexual practices: adultery and homosexuality. Building upon these investigations, the next chapter will attempt to analyze the way in which the regulation of such sexual behavior relates to more general questions of political ideology, particularly to democratic theory. So as not to leave this general discussion of the enforcement of morals vulnerable to the criticism that it relies exclusively upon material concerning sex and gender, the present chapter takes up aspects of the legal regulation of religious behavior. Although modern discussions of the enforcement of morals often confine themselves to the realm of sexual morality, the nature and scope of the statutory provisions for the enforcement of socio-religious norms is, in most legal systems, one of the most significant criteria by which to evaluate various aspects of the relationship of the individual and the family to the state and to the society as a whole. This is no less the case in classical Athens where the processes which regulate religious practices and beliefs are of central importance for an understanding of issues like the relation between law and morals, the place of individual liberty and freedom of conscience, and the link between democracy and toleration. Indeed, Plato's Republic and Laws bear witness to the recognition of the importance of religious conformity, as, in its own way, does the trial of Socrates.