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The growing literature on the relationship between democracy and war has focused on two questions-Whether democracies are more pacific than other types of government, and why democracies do not seem to go to war against each other. In the spirit of Lakatosian cumulativeness - looking for explanations with excess empirical content - this commentary supports one explanation of the `why democracies do not fight democracies' question. The model supported is an expected utility formulation by Bueno de Mesquita & Lalman based on the logical relationships between states which are `doves' and `non-doves'. The same explanation for democracy-to-democracy peace provided by the Bueno de Mesquita-Lalman analytics, based on the ability to `separate' states into doves and non-doves, can be used to explain the linkages between integration and the Deutschian concept of `security community'.

Distance learning has become increasingly prominent in discussions of educational change. It holds promise of external learning beyond the physical confines of traditional schools, creating new forms of community. During the last decade, considerable experience has accumulated through projects that have implemented different innovative visions of distance learning. Five groups of issues have emerged that affect the success of projects; they are technology functioning, community creation, discourse forms, activity definition, and quality control. Several projects illustrate the influence of these factors in different contexts. The first research phase allows us to understand how the potential of the technologies can best be used and what supports are needed to ensure that these innovations are robust. The second phase of research asks questions about the impact of distance learning on cognitive and social functioning. These questions can be legitimately asked only from the prior sustained platform of practice.

Throughout the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, a large ethnic minority group, generally known as Gypsies, has for generations suffered from severe discrimination and social ostracism. Ann Buchanan learnt, during visits to child care establishments in the region, that up to ninety per cent of children in state care were children of Gypsy origin. The tragedy is that these children have little chance of obtaining work on leaving care and, as Ágnes Diósi reports here, may not be offered any care at all.

Recent ethnographic studies of workplace practices indicate that the ways people actually work usually differ fundamentally from the ways organizations describe that work in manuals, training programs, organizational charts, and job descriptions. Nevertheless, organizations tend to rely on the latter in their attempts to understand and improve work practice. We examine one such study. We then relate its conclusions to compatible investigations of learning and of innovation to argue that conventional descriptions of jobs mask not only the ways people work, but also significant learning and innovation generated in the informal communities-of-practice in which they work. By reassessing work, learning, and innovation in the context of actual communities and actual practices, we suggest that the connections between these three become apparent. With a unified view of working, learning, and innovating, it should be possible to reconceive of and redesign organizations to improve all three.

The authors report an attempt to enhance parent—professional collaboration on behalf of children with learning disabilities through an action-research project. The theoretical assumptions and program components of action research as well as a detailed description of the Learning Disabilities Project are presented.