Understanding our link to the Great Apes—the 2003 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Sciences awarded to Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall is the recipient of the 2003 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Sciences for her long-term scientific studies of chimpanzee behavior. Not only were her studies the first of their kind, her meticulous behavioral recordings led to major changes in our understanding of the social links that exist between ourselves and our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. In discussing the importance of Dr. Goodall's work, Stephen Jay Gould (the late Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University) said ... “Science gains enormous power in replications of observations, but Homo sapiens is a single species and we can never know, by studying ourselves alone, whether important aspects of our behaviors and mental capacities reflect an ancestral evolutionary heritage (transmogrified through our uniquely evolved intelligence and its social correlates), or new features evolved or socially acquired only by our lineage. Chimpanzees are the best natural experiment we will ever have for exploring this central question, for chimps are our closest genealogical cousins and therefore hold more of our common evolutionary heritage than any other species can. Chimpanzees are not so much the shadow of man as our mirror, only slightly blurred by the mists of time”.     

Comparability of essay question variants

Writing task variants can increase test security in high-stakes essay assessments by substantially increasing the pool of available writing stimuli and by making the specific writing task less predictable. A given prompt (parent) may be used as the basis for one or more different variants. Six variant types based on argument essay prompts from a large-scale, high-stakes North American writing assessment and six based on issue prompts from the same test were created and evaluated in the research section of the test administrations in the winter of 2009. Examinees were asked to volunteer to write an essay on one of the new prompt/variant tasks. Essays were obtained from 7573 examinees for argument prompts and 10,827 examinees for issue prompts. Results indicated that all variant types produced reasonably similar means, standard deviations, and rater reliabilities, suggesting that the variant strategy should be useable for operational administrations in high stakes essay assessments. Variant type did not interact with gender, ethnicity, or language (self-report that English or another language is the examinee's “best” language).     

科技期刊论文作者简介著录信息刍议

作者简介是为了满足读者了解作者的基本情况, 有助于编辑、作者、读者之间进行交流, 有助于有关信息文献量化分析. 但是, 目前国内出版的科技期刊论文作者简介著录信息却存在不统一, 编排位置不一致等问题, 为了使科技期刊中作者简介的编排更规范、合理, 为了使编辑节省更多时间来关注于论文内容质量的提高, 作者简介内容应简约、实用.     

Transformational change and business process reengineering (BPR): Lessons from the British and Dutch public sector

Facilitated by electronic government, public agencies are looking for transformational change by making a radical improvement. At first glance, this development is similar to the business process re-engineering (BPR) movement in the private sector. While policy makers and practitioners in the public sector have branded their recent improvements as BPR, the academic and research community have thus far eluded from making any comparisons. This has left a vacuum in terms of understanding the complexity of the challenges facing e-Government re-engineering and resultant change in public agencies. The aim of this paper is to translate the BPR movement findings to the field of e-Government induced change in the public sector. BPR characteristics and challenges are derived using normative literature and compared with two cases of public sector transformation in the UK and Netherlands. The results of these cases show that e-Government-induced change requires a plan for a radical improvement which, in contrast to BPR, is obtained by incremental steps and has a high level of participation. The findings offer policy makers valuable insights into the complexities and possible strategies that may need to be followed in order to succeed in e-Government implementation.     

Low cost broadband network model using WiMAX technology

This paper proposes a design for a low cost network model designed for rural and remote areas of the globe. It presents a six component framework, comprised of technical and non-technical issues that will guide a successful design and deployment of a community size wireless network. The authors conducted a number of studies in England and Tanzania to study available technologies, their potentials and shortcomings. They also studied challenges facing remote areas of developing countries as well as the challenges that face network operators in developing countries. Using the outcomes from these studies, they designed a model that takes a holistic approach to address these challenges. The designed model uses WiMAX technology as a key factor in creating a low cost community owned network. Practical and simulation tests show that a single base station WiMAX network is capable of covering up to 10 km radius community, linking wirelessly with acceptable quality services. Designed model is suitable for small communities in rural and remote areas in developing countries. Network designs are useful for anyone looking to build campus size wireless networks.     

Universal museums, museum objects and repatriation: The tangled stories of things

This paper discusses the contribution of the 2003 ‘Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums’ to the debate on repatriation. The ‘Universalist’ approach taken by the Declaration is first considered, noting the implications of its emphasis on art, the heritage of museums and objects, along with its focus on the sculpture of ancient Greece and the enlightenment origin of museums such as the British Museum. It is argued that it reveals an essentialist approach that derives from a particular Western perspective, rather than being truly ‘universal’, and then considers whether a similar problem underlies many of the arguments advocating repatriation. The second part of the paper explores the opportunities offered by an approach which emphasises the ‘biography of objects’. This demonstrates how the tangled histories of objects and their many meanings can be considered. Repatriation is shown to be able to result in an increase in knowledge and understanding, rather than its destruction, and so meets the declared aim of the Declaration to ‘foster knowledge by a continuous process of reinterpretation’.     

Assessing the relationship between different types of student feedback and the quality of revised writing

This paper reports on a quasi-experimental study comparing the effects of peer-editing to self-editing on improving students’ revised drafts. The study involved two intact classes (experimental and control groups) of an English course. The experimental group practiced peer-editing while the control group engaged in self-editing. After receiving sufficient training in their respective type of editing, both groups wrote a graded argumentative essay in two drafts. Results of a MANCOVA test carried out on the graded essay written by the two groups showed a statistically significant difference in revised writing in favour of peer-editing. A random sample of seven peer-edited and self-edited essays was analyzed to determine the differences between peer-editors’ and self-editors’ ability to notice errors, revise, and improve them. Results revealed that while peer-editors and self-editors had more or less the same noticing ability, writers who engaged in self-editing revised more errors than writers who received peer-feedback. In contrast, writers who engaged in peer-editing improved their revised drafts more than self-editors did. Differences in revised writing performance between the two groups are attributed to the use of language learning strategies, peer interaction, and engagement with language. The paper concludes with implications for classroom teaching/learning and recommendations for future research.     

An investigation of academic writing in secondary schools to inform the development of diagnostic classroom assessments

Despite the high stakes attached to students’ performance on assessments of academic writing, we still know little about the challenges students face when composing in academic contexts. To begin to address this problem, two studies were designed with the following aims: to identify and describe the most prevalent types of academic writing at the secondary level, and to characterize the challenges that both English Language Learners (ELLs) and non-English-Language Learners (non-ELLs) experience with this type of writing. Findings from these studies reveal that (1) in the context of New York City schools, exposition/argument is the most prevalent genre assigned as a writing task in secondary classrooms, as well as the most valued; and that (2) while both Intermediate ELLs and non-ELLs articulated Translating (the process of articulating ideas in the conventions of written English) as the most frequent challenge, the two groups differed in the kinds of Translating challenges and in the types and range of other challenges they articulated: ELLs articulated fewer challenges specifically related to the genre of exposition than did non-ELLs. Based on these findings we suggest several new approaches to classroom diagnostic assessment of writing, and raise issues to be considered in these approaches.     

Killing a culture softly: Corporate partnership with a Russian museum

Information communications technology provides a way on the World Wide Web for national museums to represent the cultural artefacts they house. Framed by the notion of cybercolonization, a colonizing of cultures and cultural institutions by computing ideas, this on-site case study of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia examines computing ideas shaping information communications technology developments within the museum and, particularly, its current IBM sponsored website 〈http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/〉. The paper will illuminate subtle cybercolonizing influences by Global IBM evident in the website structure, design, targeting, esthetic choices, cultural content realignment, IBM corporate e-business underlay, and American English branding. The notion of cyberglocalization, an adapting of global cyber processes to local circumstances, is offered as an avenue to address colonization present in the Hermitage-IBM website. The case study offers museum professionals an illustration of the underlying assumptions about information communications technology (ICT) ideas, interaction, and appearance in the development of museum websites.