Education and Development: Era of Hope and Disillusionment

It seems almost superfluous to have to highlight formal education as a social and moral institution (historically that has been its main role) but for the fact that after the Second World War greater consciousness on the part of rich industrialized countries spawns fresh concepts and notions that education is an economic enterprise. The human capital concept popularized by the Chicago School of economics as reflected in the works of Schultz and the seminal work of Denison catapulted education into the forefront as an engine of economic development for the so-called Third World countries. Heavy physical capital investment, with the exception of Japan and Germany, which is thought to be a sufficient stimulus for economic development in classical economic theory fails to deliver the goods. The frantic search for an efficacious solution to Third World Poverty unearths the forgotten dimension of educated and trained manpower as the missing variable in the economic development equation. Education becomes the new faith for Third Worlds in their attempts to banish poverty and join the rich industrial clubs. Needless to say, the new faith which holds sway for more than a decade ends in disillusionment (reflected in the Belagio Conference of 1974) for trained manpower is a necessary but not sufficient condition for national development. The complementarity and substitutability of physical and human capital have been overlooked. But whilst the human capital formation theory holds sway, formal education becomes predominently an economic enterprise and correspondingly its function as a social and moral enterprise is reduced in importance.     

In search of query patterns: A case study of a university OPAC

A transaction log analysis of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) OPAC was conducted to identify query and search failure patterns with the goal of identifying areas of improvement for the system. One semester’s worth of OPAC transaction logs were obtained and from these, 641,991 queries were extracted and used for this work. Issues investigated included query length, frequency and type of search options and Boolean operators used as well as their relationships with search failure. Among other findings, results indicate that a majority of the queries were simple, with short query lengths and a low usage of Boolean operators. Failure analysis revealed that on average, users had an almost equal chance of obtaining no records or at least one record to a submitted query. We propose enhancements and suggest future areas of work to improve the users’ search experience with the NTU OPAC.     

Barometer for Beauty: How Cosmetic Surgery Websites Define and Visualize “What Is Beautiful”

The present study investigated visuals on cosmetic surgery websites to better understand how these sites depict ideal beauty. The content analysis of 90 cosmetic surgery websites found most sites used general photos and more than half used 10 or more before-and-after photos. Women outnumbered men in general photographs but not in before-and-after photographs. Brunette men and women significantly outnumbered blondes. However, there were significantly more men with dark-colored eyes, while women were significantly more likely to have light-colored eyes. Implications are discussed.