Why do people take personal blame for consequences for which they were not responsible? How do they come to see themselves as responsible for things they clearly could not have controlled? This talk explores answers to this question with reference to literature, cross-cultural research, and the work of the philosopher Bernard Williams. “Moral luck” and “agent-regret,” concepts developed by Williams, refer to human problems and experiences that may be universal. They relate to how blame and responsibility get distributed in the face of misfortune, and how, I will argue, the moral actor participates in the larger web of life that constitutes one’s history.

It has been more than a decade since we expected to see a new museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District. The wait is long, and it has been a rather alarming period for existing Hong Kong public museums in the face of excitement and increasing demands from the general public. In this project, which investigated the series of changes that local museum were adapted to (for example, in terms of interactive technologies and blockbuster exhibitions), I discovered that something of higher importance has been overlooked—our own permanent collection. Objects are the core business of a museum. Why was it neglected? And what were the impacts of taking focus off the permanent collection? These questions invite many thoughts that ought to be sorted out before plans are set to build better museums.

A recent trend in research of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is to incorporate established experimental methodology as well as new methods in learning sciences to produce demonstrable improvements in second language (L2) learning. This new method is referred to as eCALL (experimentalized CALL). This talk introduces two empirical experiments that examined the effectiveness of two versions of an eCALL tutor that provided training on English article usage for L2 learners in China. The Article Tutor was designed based on the Competition Model, a psycholinguistic model for language acquisition. The tutor incorporated a Bayesian knowledge tracing model to achieve individualized student tracking and adaptive learning. Data were analyzed through behavioral measurements and methods of educational data mining. The studies generated significant theoretical and pedagogical implications in second language learning.