Measure of Despair: the Syndicate for Commerce and Industry, the London Tribune, and German Foreign Policy, 1906–8
Based on fresh archival sources in Germany and Britain, this article offers new insight into the mindest of the German Foreign Ministry in the aftermath of the First Morocco Crisis of 1905/06. Eager to arrest the deterioration in the Anglo-German relationship and concerned about its fallout for US-German relations, the German Foreign Ministry, in league with twenty of the country's top financiers, took a radical initiative which resulted in Germany's largest expenditure, before the First World War, on influencing the press. The article closes with a transnational comparison, detailing a similar influence-buying scheme masterminded by a high-level British political wire-puller.
The case for continuity
Abstract This article defends a continuity position. Infants can abstract numerosity and young preschool children do respond appropriately to tasks that tap their ability to use a count and cardinal value and/or arithmetic principles. Active use of a nonverbal domain of arithmetic serves to enable the child to find relevant data to build knowledge about the language and use rules of numerosity and quantity.
Children's understanding of counting
This study examines the abstractness of children's mental representation of counting, and their understanding that the last number word used in a count tells how many items there are (the cardinal word principle). In the first experiment, twenty-four 2- and 3-year-olds counted objects, actions, and sounds. Children counted objects best, but most showed some ability to generalize their counting to actions and sounds, suggesting that at a very young age, children begin to develop an abstract, generalizable mental representation of the counting routine. However, when asked "how many" following counting, only older children (mean age 3.6) gave the last number word used in the count a majority of the time, suggesting that the younger children did not understand the cardinal word principle. In the second experiment (the "give-a-number" task), the same children were asked to give a puppet one, two, three, five, and six items from a pile. The older children counted the items, showing a clear understanding of the cardinal word principle. The younger children succeeded only at giving one and sometimes two items, and never used counting to solve the task. A comparison of individual children's performance across the "how-many" and "give-a-number" tasks shows strong within-child consistency, indicating that children learn the cardinal word principle at roughly 3 1/2 years of age. In the third experiment, 18 2- and 3-year-olds were asked several times for one, two, three, five, and six items, to determine the largest numerosity at which each child could succeed consistently. Results indicate that children learn the meanings of smaller number words before larger ones within their counting range, up to the number three or four. They then learn the cardinal word principle at roughly 3 1/2 years of age, and perform a general induction over this knowledge to acquire the meanings of all the number words within their counting range.