Digital Museums and Diverse Cultural Knowledges: Moving Past the Traditional Catalog

Web 2.0 technologies have introduced increasingly participatory practices to creating content, and museums are becoming interested in the potentials of “Museum 2.0” for reaching and engaging with new audiences. As technological advances are opening up the ways in which museums share information about the objects in their collections, the means by which museums create, handle, process, and transmit knowledge has become more transparent. For this to be done effectively, however, some underlying contradictions must be resolved between museum practices, which privilege the account of the “expert,” and distributed social technology practices, whose strengths lie in allowing for many, sometimes contradictory, perspectives. This article presents a theoretical position and framework for the adaptation of Web 2.0 technologies within the traditional work of the museum, in ways that support the generation and representation of knowledge in, by, and for diverse communities. We then expand on this theoretical perspective by discussing several case studies of exploratory work in this area, and close the article by presenting a few tactical, bottom-up initiatives that museums and distributed communities can take to facilitate the diffusion of this new conceptual framework. Though the subject of this article is online museums, the issues are relevant to all online collections, in particular portals, online public access catalogs (OPAC), and content management systems.     

Spintronics

Spintronics is creating new excitement in the scientific world. In Part 1 of this two-part article, we will deal in an elementary fashion with the principles of spintronics. R Srinivasan was the former Director of Centre for Advanced Technology, Indore and at present a Visiting Professor with the Laser-Cooling Group, Raman Research Institute.     

Adaptive Filtering of Newswire Stories using Two-Level Clustering

Adaptive filtering of news is an area of information retrieval gaining substantial interest as services become more available on the Internet. This paper reports on a number of experiments involving a two-level clustering approach using a variety of techniques including threshold adaptation, topic vocabulary adaptation and both noun phrase and named entity adaptation. Our goal in this exploratory research is to empirically compare alternative configurations of our filtering approach that will allow us to better understand the relative value of the component subsystems.     

Reliability — How to quantify and improve?

The basic concepts relating to reliability, including the statistical distributions employed are explained in this article. The approach of physicists, material scientists and engineers to improve reliability are emphasized.The qualitative measures would greatly help in improving quality and life of the products we use.     

A paradox in radiation heat transfer

Heat transfer between two surfaces usually increases when the temperature difference between the two surfaces increases. Here we highlight an unusual situation in radiation heat transfer wherein the heat transfer decreases when the temperature difference increases.     

Mesoionic compounds

Mesoionic compounds are distinct types of heterocycles which belong to the class of nonbenzenoid aromatics. Sydnone, the representative mesoionic compound has been extensively studied because of its unusual structure, chemical properties and synthetic utility. Sydnone is used as a versatile synthon in heterocyclic synthesis. This article gives a brief account of the comparative studies of the structural features of mesoionic compounds and other heteroaromatic systems. Some synthetically useful tandem reactions of sydnones are also discussed.