Statistical Thinking: Components and Measurement Challenges

Problem. The statistical analysis of the changing and uncertain information is an increasingly important component of decision making in the modern world. Therefore, the necessity to develop statistical thinking of students of all levels of education has grown significantly. The "statistical literacy" of students is a relatively new term in statistics education research which needs special attention. Goal. The purpose of this article is to attract attention to the problems of teaching modern statistics to university students which is necessary to meet the requirements of statistics knowledge in today’s information world, and to comprehend the matter of the term "statistical literacy" of students in modern understanding of these words, to understand what should be considered as the desired outcomes of the statistic education. Methodology. The results presented in this paper were obtained by the analysis of the existing methodological investigations in the modern statistics education with the emphasis on the development of the students’ statistical thinking and reasoning, and on the ability to apply their knowledge in statistics in fulfilling the professional tasks. Results. Application of new pedagogical techniques in the statistics education is of paramount importance for the development of students' statistical thinking and reasoning. It is important for students to develop statistical thinking by combining abstract conceptions of statistics with the actual content of information to which statistical analysis is applied. The statistical reasoning of the students can best be assessed through oral discussions or detailed student work with professional content. For deeper understanding of statistical concepts, it is important to simplify learning rather than extending the educational program. Students should be encouraged to explain their reasoning, to mutually criticize arguments and to find new ways of solving problems. They should be encouraged to ask «why» rather than «how», and pushed to substantiate their thinking process and, by this means, modern understanding of statistics will be provided. Originality. Training engineers as sufficiently informed workers capable of making correct decisions requires educations in the area of methods of modern statistics in close connection with professional education. Practical value. Summing up, it has been proved that one of the most important tasks of the students’ education in statistics is, first of all, to develop their understanding of the practical necessity and economic feasibility of using statistics in their future professional activities, to develop their statistical thinking, and to learn how to use the methods of mathematical statistics for analyzing professional information.

Research on rhetoric is often limited to the history of the question and the analysis of rhetorical techniques from the classical rhetorical canon. However, in the modern world, this is not enough. This article is devoted to the study of questions about visual and digital rhetoric: your interrelated areas that play a key role in the modern information world, because with the help of rhetoric, various models of reality are tested, mastered and constructed. Because rhetoric by its very nature acts as a mechanism for constructing and interpreting models of reality, performing a key role in the formation of public consciousness. Within the framework of this abstract, we will consider the main aspects of the study of these disciplines, as well as their impact on the formation and perception of messages in modern society. Due to the rapid development of technology and constant changes in the media environment, philosophical analysis of visual and digital rhetoric is becoming a necessary tool for understanding the essence of new challenges. Visual rhetoric can create specific frames of perception, controlling the audience's attention and influencing their interpretation of events and phenomena. Digital rhetoric studies the impact of digital technologies on communication methods, language use, and the effectiveness of persuasion in a digital environment. Philosophical analysis of these areas becomes particularly important in light of the rapid development of technology and dynamic changes in the media environment, and therefore in the human consciousness. The philosophy-based approach allows for a deeper understanding of the nature and differences between visual and digital rhetoric, their roots, and ethical aspects. The philosophical approach allows us to ask solid, fruitful questions about how visual and digital media influence our beliefs, values, and cultural norms. Philosophy manifests the potential challenges and risks associated with the use of visual and digital means of communication, as digital rhetoric faces a number of challenges, such as excessive amounts of information, ephemeral messages, awareness of falsehood-authenticity, technical limitations, and others. The article justifies the importance of philosophical analysis in the context of the modern information landscape, helping us to interact more consciously and effectively with these powerful means of communication and expression. The article provides a framework for critical thinking that allows society to adapt to constant changes and develop in conditions of information saturation.

The main recommendations of the panel report can be summarised under five key headings:  HUMANITY The Panel recommends recognition that research in this field should be geared towards the development of critical understandings of self and society in the modern world. Archaeological research into the modern past should be ambitious in seeking to contribute to understanding of the major social, economic and environmental developments through which the modern world came into being. Modern-world archaeology can add significantly to knowledge of Scotland’s historical relationships with the rest of the British Isles, Europe and the wider world. Archaeology offers a new perspective on what it has meant to be a modern person and a member of modern society, inhabiting a modern world.  MATERIALITY The Panel recommends approaches to research which focus on the materiality of the recent past (i.e. the character of relationships between people and their material world). Archaeology’s contribution to understandings of the modern world lies in its ability to situate, humanise and contextualise broader historical developments. Archaeological research can provide new insights into the modern past by investigating historical trends not as abstract phenomena but as changes to real lives, affecting different localities in different ways. Archaeology can take a long-term perspective on major modern developments, researching their ‘prehistory’ (which often extends back into the Middle Ages) and their material legacy in the present. Archaeology can humanise and contextualise long-term processes and global connections by working outwards from individual life stories, developing biographies of individual artefacts and buildings and evidencing the reciprocity of people, things, places and landscapes. The modern person and modern social relationships were formed in and through material environments and, to understand modern humanity, it is crucial that we understand humanity’s material relationships in the modern world.  PERSPECTIVE The Panel recommends the development, realisation and promotion of work which takes a critical perspective on the present from a deeper understanding of the recent past. Research into the modern past provides a critical perspective on the present, uncovering the origins of our current ways of life and of relating to each other and to the world around us. It is important that this relevance is acknowledged, understood, developed and mobilised to connect past, present and future. The material approach of archaeology can enhance understanding, challenge assumptions and develop new and alternative histories. Modern Scotland: Archaeology, the Modern past and the Modern present vi Archaeology can evidence varied experience of social, environmental and economic change in the past. It can consider questions of local distinctiveness and global homogeneity in complex and nuanced ways. It can reveal the hidden histories of those whose ways of life diverged from the historical mainstream. Archaeology can challenge simplistic, essentialist understandings of the recent Scottish past, providing insights into the historical character and interaction of Scottish, British and other identities and ideologies.  COLLABORATION The Panel recommends the development of integrated and collaborative research practices. Perhaps above all other periods of the past, the modern past is a field of enquiry where there is great potential benefit in collaboration between different specialist sectors within archaeology, between different disciplines, between Scottish-based researchers and researchers elsewhere in the world and between professionals and the public. The Panel advocates the development of new ways of working involving integrated and collaborative investigation of the modern past. Extending beyond previous modes of inter-disciplinary practice, these new approaches should involve active engagement between different interests developing collaborative responses to common questions and problems.  REFLECTION The Panel recommends that a reflexive approach is taken to the archaeology of the modern past, requiring research into the nature of academic, professional and public engagements with the modern past and the development of new reflexive modes of practice. Archaeology investigates the past but it does so from its position in the present. Research should develop a greater understanding of modern-period archaeology as a scholarly pursuit and social practice in the present. Research should provide insights into the ways in which the modern past is presented and represented in particular contexts. Work is required to better evidence popular understandings of and engagements with the modern past and to understand the politics of the recent past, particularly its material aspect. Research should seek to advance knowledge and understanding of the moral and ethical viewpoints held by professionals and members of the public in relation to the archaeology of the recent past. There is a need to critically review public engagement practices in modern-world archaeology and develop new modes of public-professional collaboration and to generate practices through which archaeology can make positive interventions in the world. And there is a need to embed processes of ethical reflection and beneficial action into archaeological practice relating to the modern past.

For centuries artistic traditions in Japan have been referred to using the term d??literally or path?a metaphor that conceives of tradition as a process (Cox 2003:51) that artists follow in pursuit of a distant, yet theo retically attainable, goal of artistic perfection (Rohlen and LeTendre 1994:375). While the way of art lives temporarily in the mortal bodies of practitioners who are in a constant state of personal development during their lifetimes, the transmission of the way from master teachers to dedicated students al lows tradition to continue in perpetuity as the way passes from generation to generation. While this conception of the way of art enables tradition to live fully in the present, modern societies generally take a reflexive view of tradition (Giddens 1994) in which tradition is conceived of as something that is distant from the present and even antithetical or hostile to modernity (Shils 1981:7). Nevertheless, artistic traditions in modern society maintain a heritage status as valuable cultural resources in danger of vanishing, thus requiring protection, maintenance, revitalization, and perhaps even reform in order to adapt to modern conditions. Such a reflexive view makes tradition in a modern society something that is negotiable or invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). In Japan, the tension between the living continuity of the way and the need for adaptability to present-day realities plays out in the negotia tions of tradition between teachers and students in the most important site of transmission: the lesson place. This paper examines a few of these sites, located both inside and outside Japan, in order to understand how the way of tradition is negotiated in the modern world between particular individuals in particular locations. Tradition is best understood not as a fixed doctrine imposed from above by elite culture-bearers, but rather as a general process of handing (Williams 1976:269) in which the significance lies more in the action of handing down than in the content that is handed down. This is certainly

With the emergence of plebiscitary leadership worldwide, research concerning the practice of plebiscitary leader democracy has caught political scientists attention. The research has mainly focused on the threats posed on modern democracy by plebiscitary leader democracy. To address the concerns over this threat, this paper explores the adaptability of plebiscitary leader democracy in modern society. This paper adopts literature research and historical analysis as its research methods and mainly uses Google Scholar as a platform to gather research works from the year 2010 to 2023, through which plebiscitary leader democracy, direct democracy and plebiscitary leadership are used as keywords. This paper analyzed more than 15 research papers to conduct analysis and concludes that the adaptability of plebiscitary leader democracy in the modern world is a weak one mainly for two reasons - one is that plebiscitary leader democracy cannot adequately and truly represent peoples will through direct democracy as it claims, the other is that the strong plebiscitary leadership opens the possibility to the personalization, centralization, and discretion of power.

Deasoon ideas are doctrine of Deasoonjinrihoe, which was founded by Ilsoon Gang, religious thinker in the late of Josun Dynasty. This study aims at examining influences of Confucius ideas implicit in Deasoon ideas and finding out their meaning in the modern society. Ilsoon Gang considered Confucianism very important when he forms his Deasoon ideas and after all, he included Confucius ideas to Deasoon ideas to develop his own religious theory. The meanings of Deasoon ideas in the modern world are as follows: First, Deasoon’s harmonious ideas on yin and yang can be a healing method to solve conflicts and confrontations of the modern society. Second, Deasoon’s harmony between God and humans and ideas on human dignity is helpful to solve human isolation that the modern society faces. Third, Deasoon’s ideas that human’s hostility and grudge must be healed teaches loves and co-existence to humans. Fourth, Dotongjinkyeong, which is Deasoon’s ideal world, is the world where communication between an individual and the whole, God and humans, a human and a human, and humans and the nature perfectly are harmonized.

In ‘Libidinal Economy,’ a reflection that was conceived in response to Deleuze and Guattari’s seminal studies on ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ (1984; 1987), Jean-François Lyotard (1993) observes that capital is the only remaining totalizing force in modern society. He adds, ‘everyone knows’ that ‘state officials’ primary duty nowadays is to ensure the health and long term stability of capital. The idea that capital is the principal structuring force in the modern world, a force that determines in a complex and multifaceted manner the set of options available to states and governments is, of course, a shared theme among the disparate range of theories of political economy, and by extension International Political Economy (IPE). But if capital is considered the only remaining totalizing force in modern society, the nature of capital itself remains curiously a mystery (Bichler and Nitzan 1996).

Future Challenges of Secularization to Asian Christianity and Theology

\nThe topic of the well-being of human and society has always interested the great thinkers of the humankind. However, conceptually, as a problem of the state and public, this topic fully emerged only in the aftermath of the Second World War in the past century, and it became especially topical in the mid-60s, when a special organization was founded on the basis of the United Nations Organization, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 1965). Well-being became a popular topic for various sociopolitical, socio-economic, cultural, and historical theoretical research and applied programmes. However, there is no unanimously agreed definition of this category or an unanimously agreed approach to its research and evaluation of its value and importance to the human and the society. The present article continues a cycle of the author’s articles devoted to the research of human well-being in nowadays conditions. It looks into the basic concepts, conceptual grounds, and contradictions shaping the key aspects of this broad topic, as well as the fundamental causes and possible methodological misconceptions influencing both their development and the attitude to them of a human, society, state. The article provides extensive statistical data which illustrate the enormous, egregious ill-being of a large part of human society in the modern world. Also, in the article we have undertaken an attempt to define well-being as a multiple-aspect concept and to present a detailed analysis of fundamental causes of the modern ill-being on a massive scale.\n

This study explores the dynamics of engaged spiritualities within contemporary Buddhist communities in Italy. By employing an ethnographic approach, the research examines how physical space fosters spiritual experiences, facilitates social interactions, and serves as a site for personal and collective transformation. The study integrates insights from religious studies, anthropology, and neuroscience to analyse the cognitive and emotional effects of meditation while also engaging with Foucault’s theories on power and space to understand Buddhist centres as structured environments that shape individual and collective subjectivities. The research highlights how engaged Buddhism in Italy adapts traditional practices to contemporary challenges, particularly in response to mental health concerns among university students. Through participant observation and interviews conducted during mindfulness and contemplative education programmes, the study demonstrates how meditation contributes to psychological well-being, emotional regulation, and social connection. This analysis aligns with theoretical discussions on the conceptualisation of spirituality in modern societies, illustrating how engaged spiritualities manifest in secular and pluralistic contexts. The findings suggest that Buddhist spaces in Italy function not only as sites of religious practice but also as transformative environments where power relations are renegotiated, identity is reconstructed, and alternative ways of living emerge. The study further explores how scientific advancements in neuroscience inform spiritual practices, shedding light on the reciprocal relationship between spiritual yearning and scientific inquiry. Finally, the research contributes to the debate on the future of engaged spiritualities in the face of global crises. It argues that while Buddhist communities in Italy preserve traditional wisdom, they also actively shape new forms of spiritual engagement that respond to contemporary social, political, and environmental challenges. This work situates engaged Buddhism as a key player in fostering alternative models of coexistence, well-being, and ethical responsibility in the modern world.

Debating Morals and the Discourse of Social Change in the Anthropology of Modern China Matthew Z. Noellert Yunxiang Yan , Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949-1999. Stanford University Press. 2003. 320 pp. Ellen Oxfeld , Drink Water, but Remember the Source: Moral Discourse in a Chinese Village. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2010. 312 pp. While the majority of the world views contemporary China as the single most formidable economic force on the planet, threatening to define a new age, anthropologists of China are taking a characteristically contrary approach by studying the deeply personal and emotional social worlds of various Chinese communities. Departing from the previous generation of anthropologists who in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the rural Chinese family as a corporate entity and the last bastion of traditional Chinese culture, the current generation, appearing on the scene in the late 1980s, has focused on the rapidly-changing social relationships and family [End Page 757] values that have accompanied China's supercharged modern economic development. While most anthropologists take for granted the dominant discourse of Chinese society's rapid transformation in the past 60 years, the main debate revolves around the role of Chinese culture in both shaping and being shaped by these extreme economic and political changes. The two ethnographies under review here represent what I see as the two sides of this debate: Yunxiang Yan focuses on how the economic and political turbulence of the People's Republic (1949-present) has changed local culture in a Northeast Chinese village, whereas Ellen Oxfeld looks at the salience of traditional values in a Southeast Chinese village as they respond and adapt to new socioeconomic institutions and relationships. From the beginning, this debate has been steeped in Western categories of socialism, capitalism, and the respective social values that accompany these economic systems, although recently at least one scholar has predicted that the increasing global power of China threatens to upset the Western theoretical hegemony that continues to dictate the discourse of "other" societies (Pieke 2009:1). This is in part due to the continued dominance of American-trained anthropologists in China, as well as the traditional place of China in the modern world as an anomaly of both non-West but also non-colonial, a society both traditional yet highly developed. Yan, born in north China and raised during the Cultural Revolution, nevertheless received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University and began by studying social networks and gift exchange in the Chinese countryside. This western training comes through in his overriding view of the rise of the selfish individual, an egotistic morality, and the retreat into private life that accompanies the alienation of individuals in modern societies. Ellen Oxfeld, American, likewise obtained her Ph.D. from Harvard (about ten years before Yan), and originally studied overseas Chinese communities in India and Canada, before these connections brought her back to their ancestral home in China Proper. Her original interest in Chinese history has, perhaps, kept her more focused on the continuities of a traditional Chinese past under the pressures of modern developments. Here I don't mean to draw any overly deterministic conclusions, but I believe this background to be increasingly meaningful as China continues to be one of the most politically charged subjects in the western academe. At the same time, both Yan and Oxfeld, carrying out the main part of their fieldwork in rural villages in the early 1990s, position their studies [End Page 758] within the dominant tradition of anthropology of the family in rural China. Yan directly challenges the entrenched theory of the Chinese family as a corporate enterprise in which the economic self-interest of the domestic group is the driving force of development, a theory held in common by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, beginning with Fei Xiaotong. 1 He points to the importance of the individual as a powerful agent in the formation of the domestic group. Oxfeld, on the other hand, takes a more neutral position, citing some of the same literature as Yan (including Yan's studies) as background to highlight the extent of changes in family structures...

Humans are exposed to chemicals in a variety of settings and through a variety of routes as they proceed through daily routines of work, recreation, relaxation, and maintenance of bodily condition. Exposure to chemicals in the modern world is unavoidable, and indeed modern society would not exist in its present form without the chemicals upon which we have come to depend for the maintenance of health, the provision of food, the production and maintenance of clothing, and the provision of the myriad of consumer products that maintain the comfortable lifestyles to which we have become accustomed. We must realize, however, that the chemicals that are responsible for our high standards of living also have the capacity to exert effects beyond those that are desired and anticipated. It is these effects that concern toxicologists as they seek to assess the benefits of chemicals versus the risks of undesirable side effects inherent in their use.

In modern terms one of the most debated topics among academics and ordinary citizens is the impact of information technology and a large amount of information flow on the consciousness and behavior. Particularly acute this problem is in situations where information technology lead to information overload personality and begin to represent a threat to the freedom of man way of life through the use of a number of hidden mechanisms of manipulation of mass consciousness. Given the complexity and ambiguity of these processes, the relevant question analysis of the impact of the information society and information technology to achieve success in life a person under constant pressure to freedom of choice and self-identity. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to analyze the process of achieving success in life rights in the information overload. The article stated that the result of an excess of information in modern society has become information explosion, which eventually turned into a permanent state of man and society. The point is that the amount of information every day literally «falls» on people is growing fantastic pace. As a result, the world of modern man is increasingly associated with information networks in which hundreds of incredible intertwined facts that often oppose each other. Find a really useful and necessary information in this stream of personality becomes more difficult. In the infinite flow of information, a person begins to produce details lose time trying to focus on minor facts and eventually forget about the purpose of their search. There is information overload or even «information paralysis». The gap between the amount of information available and the ability of humans to learn, however, that the person knows and understands, and that, in her opinion, she has to know is growing. This causes the appearance of such psychological phenomena as information anxiety and self-doubt. Mankind was in a paradoxical situation: a person drowning in the flow of data, but feels the need for more and more knowledge. We can therefore say that the information society and its value system is not only good, contributing to the development of the individual, but also carries certain dangers associated with the formation of a «risk society», which complicates the process of human life. Under these conditions, greatly increases the role of the internal potential of the individual, in particular – its educational capital, through which an individual can effectively resist the redundant information flow in the process of understanding the goals and ways to achieve success in life. Conversely, lack of self-control and critical quantitative and qualitative characteristics of information that can rethink the man can not cause it to develop and achieve success in life, and to significant psychological and physical damage. The value of human internal resources to achieve success in life lies in the fact that information overload creates favorable conditions in order to deprive the person opportunities to properly assess and verify the information, and therefore – opens space for manipulation by the public authorities and media owners. Therefore, in today’s information society, increasing role incredibly personal autonomy. In order to operate effectively and achieve success in life, one must learn to «sift» and critically analyze all the information. This is a complicated process, but it has become a necessity and its implementation will require a significant increase in domestic capacity of the individual. It is concluded that in the modern world is information overload citizens, which makes it difficult to achieve success in life man. Therefore, to convert to an independent life, people should improve their internal resources, the main of which is the educational capital. It is people’s ability to independently and critically rethink the flow of information, willingness to proactive behavior in the new environment are critical to success in life.

Today, theorists of science traditionally attribute issues of ideology to the sphere of political science and social philosophy. Representatives of modern legal science, especially in Russia, are much less likely to express their views on this problem, including because it is rather difficult topic for jurisprudence. Prof. Klimenko’s monograph seems to us particularly interesting in this regard. He considers legal ideology as a mechanism for organizing the entire ideological sphere of society, scrupulously analyzes contemporary sociopolitical processes, determines the place and tendencies of the ideological component in law, and notes the growing importance of legal legitimacy discourse. We pay tribute to the courage of the author, who presented his own vision of acute and challengeable issues of the essence and nature of legal ideology in modern Western-style society, as well as analysis of the meaning of such ideology in the context of a modern politically organized society: this is a purely legal analysis that differs significantly from that adopted in political science. Prof. Klimenko seeks to focus not on the task of defining the definition of legal ideology, but on how to solve the methodological task posed in the study of this extremely important multifaceted phenomenon: preventing absolutization of any of its features, since this, according to the researcher, leads to "Service" concept of legal ideology or to its mythologization. The ‘multidimensionality’ of the political ideology, taking into account the entire degree of complexity of this phenomenon at all stages of its functioning, allows revealing a thorough consideration of its structure. As a result, the author was able to show that legal ideology is in demand as a special mechanism for organizing the ideological sphere of modern society, primarily because it is capable of performing a number of important functions in modern states. These functions are analyzed in detail in the monograph in the context of the objects of influence of legal ideology. Prof. Klimenko argues that the most important are the functions determined by the essence of legal ideology, and not its nature: such functions he considers as optional and rudimentary. In his monograph, the researcher classifies the functions of legal ideology depending on the objects of influence to which he relates: a person, the state apparatus, civil society, a politically organized society, the legal system as a whole. We conclude that Prof. Klimenko’s monograph demonstrates the effectiveness of applying functional-structural approach to the issues of legal ideology and its evolution in the modern world.

This research paper focuses on lacquer art and its role in Vietnamese history, as well as in the modern world. It explains the harsh labor conditions and time-intensive process that go into creating a piece of lacquer art, and attempts to explain why, in spite of its difficulty, it is still made today. Lacquer art has traveled through many Asian countries, and yet this paper focuses on one specific type: Vietnamese traditional lacquer art. As an art technique unique to the culture and history of Vietnam, it is distinctive and not just taken from other countries. Though the process of creating a piece is intense and restless, even leaving marks upon the artist’s skin, the resulting product is truly unmeasurable. Vietnamese lacquer art has been the country’s traditional art form for over 2,000 years, with it serving as relics in pagodas and spiritual items for Buddhism, worship paintings, communal houses, etc. Its labor, history, and the application of this traditional technique combined with artistic creations of older and younger artists has formed it into what it is today. Though this art form is not usually known in modern society, in the art world and among older generations, this art form is extremely valuable due to its materials, labor, and the history that it holds, which is why there are so many collectors from around the world collecting these pieces.