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When students relate current events to the concepts studied in the classroom by writing and presenting a series of analyses in the form of regular journaling, their learning and critical thinking improves as they regularly connect theory, presented in the lessons and textbooks, to real-world applications. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A rubric used to assess the progress of student critical thinking showed that all three categories that display critical thinking through reflective reasoning improved: analysis, comprehension and application.

This paper establishes the positive impact of current event journaling on critical thinking and student interest in courses by monitoring courses where current event journaling was incorporated. One of the key findings of this study is that the critical thinking skills of students evolved and became more advanced as the semester progressed, as did their ability to identify links in research and studies to class content.

As students become more engaged, this helps them to better absorb and understand the material being taught.

Completing these analyses and presenting them to the class helps students succeed in seeing the connection between theory presented in textbooks and its real-world applications.

Another important result is that by incorporating regular current event analyses and presentations, students grow more interested in the course itself.

Critical thinking falls into three different categories that can be displayed as reflective reasoning: analysis, comprehension and application.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the long tail of topical search queries, including the influence of current events, posed to a large, urban public library discovery system.

Search queries from the months of June, July, August and September 2014 (1,488,339 total queries) were collected from the Edmonton Public Library’s BiblioCommons database using Google Analytics and exported to Excel. The data were then analyzed using descriptive statistics, frequency counts and textual analysis to explicate the long tail of search, (including the most popular searches) and to explore the relationship between topical search queries and current events.

The findings support the long tail theory, as the aggregate tail of topical search queries comprised the vast majority of the total searches and current events exert some influence on the nature and frequency of topical searches.

Data collection was limited to four months of the year; thus, comparisons across the year cannot be made. There are practical implications for public libraries in terms of marketing and collections, as well as for improving catalogue functionality, to support user search behaviour.

Not much research attention has been focused on the nature of topical search queries in public libraries compared to academic libraries and the Web. The findings contribute to developing insight into the divergent interests of intergenerational public library users and the topics of materials they are searching for.

We show political divisions in perceptions of police officers even before the divisive political and social events of 2016. We do so using respondents' interpretations of surprising and ambiguous headlines involving police officers (e.g., assumptions about what happened or who was involved).

We use affect control theory's ABO event structure and derivations of this structure to construct a set of headlines that describe ostensibly good people (A) doing bad things (B) to other good people (O) or are ambiguous on one or more of these components. We present 517 MTurk respondents with a set of seven headlines and collect quantitative and qualitative data on their reactions to, and interpretations of, these headline events.

Police headlines generate interest among readers. When interpreting events, respondents are less likely to modify or redefine police officers compared to other actors. However, assumptions related to ambiguous events involving police differ by political orientation. Liberals view police more negatively than conservatives, in part because they imagine them doing worse things to slightly better people. Qualitative analyses support and shed light on the mechanisms underlying this and other partisan effects.

The research was designed to examine interest in headline structure, not specific actors. Thus, the patterns unique to police and political differences were not an original focus. We believe these inductive results are informative, but a study expressly designed to test hypotheses regarding perceptions of events with police officers is recommended for future work.

Understanding the political divide in perceptions of police and the potential of media coverage for exacerbating these effects is essential and related to ACTs growing interest in meaning divergence.

The purpose of this paper is to understand projectification processes of the global organization, based on the example of the Catholic Church’s activities. The Catholic Church is the oldest and the largest international organisation to be assessed also from the longue durée perspective. The Church as both a large and supranational organisation and a religious community has carried out a lot of social tasks. A part of its activity relating to the Church’s basic mission is carried out in these days in the form of various projects. In this paper, the authors demonstrate that seemingly unchanging structure, such as the Catholic Church, based on a determined hierarchy, strict principles and rules of conduct, is affected by the projectification processes.

The authors chose the method of a single case study. To analyse the projectification processes in the Church, the authors focussed on flagship mega-events of WYD programme, from which the following were selected: Rome (1985), Manila (1995), Sydney (2008), Rio de Janeiro (2013) and Krakow (2016).

The study demonstrates that organisational projectification processes can have a real impact on the strategic changes in the global organisation. Under the influence of significant projects, organisations can change internally and also redefine their way of interacting with the stakeholders. Projectification at the same time is a change and leads to it. The research also shows that projectification of a global organisation can intensify internal learning processes. On the one hand, “projectification agents” transfer project practices to various regions of the world, and, on the other, draw on local practices. Therefore, the projectification process is not simply transplanting the project “virus” into new places, but also a process of change and adaptation to the stimuli flowing from the environment.

The particularities, the distinctiveness of the projects of the Catholic Church can be an inspiration for others realizing projects. The experience of the Catholic Church in the implementation of WYD can be valuable for organisations implementing other projects that require involvement and activation of many, diverse stakeholders, for example, charitable projects or the so-called community engagement projects implemented by large international organisations, such as the World Bank, UNICEF, the UN, the Red Cross or humanitarian projects organised by NGOs in different parts of the world.

There have been increasing calls for social studies educators to engage issues of sustainability. Proponents argue that the very survival of the planet depends on the degree to which teachers can move learners away from unsustainable beliefs and behaviors to those grounded in interdisciplinary approaches to solving community and global challenges. How to implement this vision of sustainability education? The purpose of the paper is to report the results of teacher-educators' curriculum and pedagogical approaches to implement the National Council for Social Studies (NCSS) C3 framework to engage and empower prospective and practicing teachers to teach for a sustainable future.

The study is guided by the growing field of self-study in teacher education, a type of research undertaken by teacher-educators with the dual purpose of personal professional development and a deep understanding of teacher-education practices. Most data were derived from multiple, recursive conversations (both formal and informal) around curriculum decisions and pedagogical choices to integrate sustainability issues into teacher-education courses. Additional data sources include classroom lecture notes and PowerPoint presentations, course readings and resources.

The authors' three years of collaborative work has shown that an issues-centered, interdisciplinary approach to select and integrate global issues, the current event article analysis, young adult literature and discussion and deliberation of local sustainable development issues that are some of the most effective pedagogical tools to engage and empower teacher candidates in learning about issues that affect the sustainable development of global community. The NCSS C3 provides a powerful framework to scaffold the process of analyzing sustainable issues while also teaching social studies curriculum and standards and skills.

Scholars of global education have called for shifting from an anthropocentric philosophy to a bio-centric worldview emphasizing the embeddedness of humans within the environment. How can social studies teacher-educators implement this vision of global education What instructional resources strategies and learning activities can be effectively integrated into existing courses to help candidates develop competences and commitment to teaching for global sustainability The study examines the innovative approaches to addressing these critical topics in teacher education.

Despite its well-founded criticism and lack of proper justification under core saturation conditions, the T-equivalent transformer model (Steinmetz scheme) is obviously championing in the literature. This educational paper aims to explain in a simple manner the limitations of the T-model of a low-frequency transformer and critically analyses some attempts to improve it.

Using a simplified examination of magnetic fluxes in the core and windings and using the modeling in ATPDraw, it is shown that transient transformer models with the indivisible leakage inductance allow circumventing the drawbacks of the T-model.

The authors show the absence of valid grounds for subdividing the leakage inductance of a transformer between its primary and secondary windings. The connection between the use of individual leakage inductances and inaccurate prediction of inrush current peaks is outlined as an important example.

The presented models can be used either as independent tools or serve as a reference for subsequent developments.

Over generations, the habitual transformer T-equivalent is widely used by engineers and Electromagnetic Transients Program experts with no attention to its inadequacy under core saturation conditions. Having studied typical winding configurations, the authors have shown that neither of them has any relation to the T-equivalent.

This educational paper will contribute to the correct understanding of the transients occurring in a transformer under abnormal conditions such as inrush current or ferroresonance events, as well as during an out-of-phase synchronization of step-up generator transformers.

Information quality has become the number one issue a knowledge worker faces in today’s environment, due to the high noise‐to‐signal ratio of non‐essential content in knowledge repositories and the lack of quality measurement for the information. This paper discusses information organization and retrieval technologies for improving the quality of knowledge by reducing the noise‐to‐signal ratio, and focusing on techniques to abstract data from search results into comprehensible knowledge for users. A case study concerning a customer management system is used to illustrate the ideas.

The purpose of this paper is to summarise the core literature on political risk and to suggest avenues for future research.

Applying bibliometric analysis as a starting point, this systematic review identifies the current core body of literature on political risk and uncovers the theoretical building blocks of the research field.

A synthesis of the key literature reveals three broad analytical foci: the sources of political risk; the effects of political risk; and actors’ (countries, industries, firms and projects) vulnerabilities, capabilities and responses to political risk.

The authors propose a unifying conceptual framework for political risk research.

The paper provides managers with a tool kit to analyse political risk. Moreover, it aids policy-makers in addressing political risk in a comprehensive manner.

The paper represents the first systematic review of the political risk literature in over 30 years. By offering an integrated theoretical framework, it paves the way for new insights into an increasingly topical field.

A differentiation between environmental scanning and other elements of marketing information systems is provided. The main environments (market, social, economic, technological, legal, etc) are overviewed with examples of the dynamic nature of marketing's environment being provided. The implications for marketing management of such changes are discussed, namely, that depending on the specific influence, marketing activities might be directly affected (new technology providing alternative methods of conducting the same activities, or legislation governing these) or, market behaviour might change due to changes in social structure, social attitudes or changed lifestyles resulting from technological and/or economic change, with the indirect implications of these for marketing response. Approaches to scanning and predicting implications for marketing are discussed.

Systems thinking calls for a shift of our mindset from seeing just parts to seeing the whole reality in its structured dynamic unity and interconnectedness. Systems thinking fosters a sensibility to see subtle connections between components and parts of reality, especially the free enterprise capitalist system (FECS). It enables us to see ourselves as active participants or partners of FECS and not mere induced factors of its production–distribution–consumption processes. Systems thinking seeks to identify the economic “structures” that underlie complex situations in FECS that bring about high versus low leveraged changes. A system is strengthened and reinforced by feedback of reciprocal exchanges that makes the system alive, transparent, human, and humanizing.

In Part I, we explore basic laws or patterns of behaviors as understood by systems thinking; in Part II we examine the basic archetypes or structured behaviors of systems thinking; in both parts we strive to see reality through the lens of critical thinking to help us understand patterns and structures of behavior among systems and their component parts. In conclusion, we argue for compatibility and complementarity of critical thinking and systems thinking to identify and resolve management problems created by our flawed thinking, and sedimented by our wanton assumptions, presumptions, suppositions and presuppositions, biases, and prejudices. Such thinking will also identify unnecessary economic and political structures of the self-serving policies we create, which imprison us.