Drawing on interviews with 90 young people who have become Witches, we explore the visual media's influence on identity formation and maintenance. Witchcraft is a late modern religion that is highly individualistic and many young people report they have become a Witch without any interaction with other Witches. The rapid growth of interest in this religion among the young since The Craft was first shown provides an important example of the mass media's role in formation of contemporary religious identity. We argue that representations of Witchcraft in the visual mass media (along with other cultural trends such as environmentalism, feminism, and individualism) and cultural resources such as books, Internet sites, and magazines provide a mediated form of social interaction that sustains the plausibility of Witchcraft as a religion. It also helps the young to develop and legitimate their beliefs and practices and develop their Witchcraft persona.

There are indications that the phenomenal growth of Witchcraft and Paganism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century may be slowing, based on statistics from selected search engines, websites, and blogs. In particular, inquisitive inquiry about contemporary Witchcraftthat is, those who are not Witches but are looking for information about it, such as seekers, dabblers, researchers, students doing term papers, and newspaper reporters-has declined since 2004. This decline, however, does not indicate that the religion is "dying out" because while the rate of increase has slowed it has not been eliminated; and of greater import, community networking appears to have remained stable, or possibly to have increased. Community networking can be seen in the use of Internet sites to share information about Witchcraft, upcoming rituals, or books and teachers, those participating in dialogue, or using the Internet as part of their spiritual work or for communications between coven meetings, or with coven members who are unable to attend. The statistics suggest that contemporary Witchcraft and Paganism may be in a period of change, in which there is a consolidation of membership with a slowing of the rate of new members, particularly among the young. Community building on the Internet continues to be important, but the intensity appears to be lessening, with indications of more people "posting" but doing so less frequently. We suggest that this indicates that Witchcraft is now entering a new phase of consolidation with less intense participation by members.

Abstract. Machine learning provides a great potential to model hydrological variables at a spatial resolution beyond the capabilities of traditional physically-based modelling. This study features an application of Random Forests (RF) to model the depth to the shallow water table, for a wintertime minimum event, at 50 m resolution over a 15,000 km2 large domain in Denmark. In Denmark, the shallow groundwater poses severe risks of groundwater induced flood events affecting both, urban and agricultural areas. The risk is especially critical in wintertime, when the shallow groundwater is close to terrain. In order to advance modelling capabilities of the shallow groundwater system and to provide estimates at scales required for decision making, this study introduces a simple method to unify RF and physically-based modelling. Results from the national water resources model in Denmark (DK-model) at 500 m resolution are employed as covariate in the RF model. Thereby, RF ensures physical consistency at coarse scale and fully exhausts high-resolution information from readily available environmental variables. The vertical distance to the nearest waterbody was rated the most important covariate in the trained RF model followed by the DK-model. The validation test of the trained RF model was very satisfying with a mean absolute error of 79 cm and a coefficient of determination of 0.55. The resulting map underlines the severity of groundwater flooding risk in Denmark, as the average depth to the shallow groundwater is 1.9 m and approximately 29 % of the area is characterised with a depth less than 1 m during a typical wintertime minimum event. This study brings forward a novel method to assess the spatial patterns of covariate importance of the RF predictions which contributes to an increased interpretability of the RF model. Quantifying uncertainty of RF models is still rare for hydrological applications. Two approaches, namely Random Forests Regression Kriging (RFRK) and Quantile Regression Forests (QRF) were tested to estimate uncertainties related to the predicted groundwater levels. This study argues that the uncertainty sources captured by RFRK and QRF can be considered independent and hence, they can be combined to a total variance through simple uncertainty propagation.

This article describes a curriculum integration project at West Chester University that pairs a professional course in educational foundations with a general education course in sociology and includes both education and non-education majors. The courses include discrete, discipline-specific objectives, but are taught using a collaborative pedagogy and an experienced learner who attends both classes and helps students make connections between disciplines and among each other. The centerpiece is an integrative, field-based research project in the schools which demonstrates that students are able to integrate the subject matter of the two courses and develops a heightened awareness of the importance of schools in our democratic society. The authors describe problems in achieving curriculum integration, but stress the promise for presewice teachers and for schools of education that are able to reach out to include non-education majors.The long-standing criticism (Dewey, , 191 5/1956 Sizer, 1985 Sizer, , 1992 that academic knowledge is too often presented in a fi-agmented fashion that makes it difficult for students to make connections between subjects is currently being addressed by attempts to integrate the curriculum, not only in elementary and secondary schools, but in universities as well (Graff, 1992). Within departments and schools of education, many faculty are working to integrate professional courses and to integrate class-based coursework with field experiences. There is a desire to integrate professional coursework with content area specialties and with general education as well. Fullan (1991), for example, talks about general education courses as a "largely unknown backdrop," and Goodlad (1 990) calls for program coherence in the preparation of teachers. Some authors also suggest that professional education courses themselves need to become "more liberal in nature'' (Proefriedt, 1994, p. 5) and focus more overtly on helping prospective teachers acquire analytical, evaluative, and interpretive skills traditionally associated with the study of the liberal arts (Weaver, 1991). An emerging literature on the importance of linking professional and liberal studies identifies two widely held views of teaching and teacher preparation, and then develops a third view that draws on postmodernist theoretical perspectives and ties these to ethical demands for social justice (Beyer,

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