Educational ethology and experiments in vacuo: Some implications for research and education 1

Course memories and careful observation in the field are both important if researchers are to come to grips with the problems in the real world of the public schools. We should keep in mind that our goal is the production of causal statements which potentially make some educationally significant difference. Using “experiments in vacuo”; a la Galileo is one way for researchers to keep themselves oriented toward the production of causal statements. “Experiments in vacuo” are also a means to avoid overlooking obvious simplicities or appraising nonevents. The examples given in this article illustrate the operation of causal events operating in chains and in parallel and some pitfalls of not examining, at least hypothetically, such causal chains or of distinguishing between causal events operating in series or in parallel. Avoiding such pitfalls is one way to prevent the pessimistic view that research tells us nothing and education makes no difference.     

Teaching Philosophy and Methods of Restorative Care to Assisted Living Owners and Staff

To implement restorative care in assisted living facilities, staff need to understand the philosophy and learn methods to help residents maintain optimal function. In this study, the researchers developed a multimedia training program designed to teach staff how to encourage residents to increase their participation in dressing themselves. Researchers conducted a pilot test to measure the short-term effects of the training on 40 staff from two states. Program effects were measured by completing a survey developed by the researchers. Pretest scores were significantly related to gender (women as a group had higher scores than men). Results indicated significant gains in knowledge at posttest. In addition, 93% of participants described positive changes related to restorative care that they planned to make at their facility as a result of the training.     

Play to win! Using games in library instruction to enhance student learning

Research has shown that educational games can have positive impacts on student learning and motivation. The success of a game played in a library instruction class depends on the type of game selected, the development of learning outcomes, and the flexibility of the librarian during class. This article explains the benefits to students and librarians of using games, discusses the development and use of a Jeopardy-style game, and provides practical tips for librarians interested in developing and incorporating games into one-time library instruction sessions.     

The information gulag: Rethinking openness in times of national danger

The founding fathers of the United States recognized that freely available information and an educated citizenry were essential to the functioning of a representative democracy. But almost as soon as the ink dried on the Constitution, political forces moved, and have continued to move, to restrict the flow of information from the government to the public, as well as among members of the public. This article examines whether information availability has become a victim of the war on terrorism – whether the nation has entered a time in which legal and policy initiatives are creating information gulags – secreting government information and restricting communications among members of the public, including the academic community. This article explores how policy is shaping the information relationship among the government, the public, academia, and the media and whether new models may be appropriate and more beneficial to society. In doing so, we examine in depth not only public access to government information but also the emerging and vital issue of government restrictions on scholarly exchange, as most recently presented by the legal dispute between the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), Department of Treasury, and subsequently the litigation brought by the Association of American University Presses (AAUP).     

Harnessing the online resources: A case study of ScienceDirect in India

E-mail-alerting system of online databases is a new trend catching up fast with researchers. Results of auto-run set queries are informed through e-mails as ‘alerts’ to the registered user. Even though e-mail-alerting systems are quite popular amongst Internet users, their inherent advantages remain unexplored in the Indian scenario. An effort to explore all such features available in the ScienceDirect online database has been made in this paper. The process of registration for activating e-mail alerts, customizing a home page, selecting favorite journals, search alerts, journal issue alerts, citation alerts and search history are briefed with screen shot examples. The study emphasizes the fact that librarians and information Science professionals should take lead roles in unveiling all such possible features available in various online databases. They should also make efforts at informing the user community of the utility of such features in a bid to enhance the research output.     

Analysis of publications of the pilot issue of the data collection of the All-Russia Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Industry of Nanosystems and Nanomaterials”

The pilot issue of the data collection of the All-Russian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Industry of Nanosystems and Nanomaterials” gives an approximate view of the state of this field of science at the beginning of 2007. The topics of articles in the pilot issue are analyzed. The directions of development of nanotechnologies are shown. The basic types of nanomaterials, the methods of their production, and their properties and applications are given.     

A web of science databases as a criterion for assessment of the research activities of Belarusian scientists

The publication activity of the scientists of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, the degree of reflection of their papers in Web of Science databases, and the data on the citation of Belarusian researchers in the studies of other scientists are discussed.     

A pipelined architecture for distributed text query evaluation

Two principal query-evaluation methodologies have been described for cluster-based implementation of distributed information retrieval systems: document partitioning and term partitioning. In a document-partitioned system, each of the processors hosts a subset of the documents in the collection, and executes every query against its local sub-collection. In a term-partitioned system, each of the processors hosts a subset of the inverted lists that make up the index of the collection, and serves them to a central machine as they are required for query evaluation. In this paper we introduce a pipelined query-evaluation methodology, based on a term-partitioned index, in which partially evaluated queries are passed amongst the set of processors that host the query terms. This arrangement retains the disk read benefits of term partitioning, but more effectively shares the computational load. We compare the three methodologies experimentally, and show that term distribution is inefficient and scales poorly. The new pipelined approach offers efficient memory utilization and efficient use of disk accesses, but suffers from problems with load balancing between nodes. Until these problems are resolved, document partitioning remains the preferred method. Alistair Moffat was supported by the Australian Research Council, the ARC Special Research Center for Perceptive and Intelligent Machines in Complex Environments, and the NICTA Victoria Laboratory. William Webber and Justin Zobel were supported by the Australian Research Council. Ricardo Baeza-Yates was supported by Grant P01-029-F from Millennium Initiative of Mideplan, Chile; and by the University of Melbourne as a visiting scholar at the time this project was undertaken.