‘Pink Tea and Sissy Boys’: Digitized Fragments of Male Homosexuality,Non-Heteronormativity and Homophobia in the Australian Sporting Press, 1845–1954

Researching the gay sporting past is difficult because of the dearth of written evidence. This article employs digital history techniques, specifically the distant and close reading of newspapers, in an attempt to locate references to male homosexuality in the Australian sporting press. The focus is not on finding references to homosexual athletes, but rather on locating attitudes, innuendo and inferences concerning homosexuality, non-heteronormative masculinity and homophobia. The sophisticated search engine provided by Trove – the digitization programme of the National Library of Australia – allows for specific word searches across 170 million articles from 800 newspapers from 1803 to 1954, including a handful of sport-themed publications. This project uses a distant-reading approach to find instances of contemporaneous homosexual-related terms – colloquialism, euphemism, legal parlance and slurs – in four popular sport newspapers and to focus on two words: effeminate and sissy. Given the commonality and multiple meanings of these words, a close reading is necessary to filter these findings in order to facilitate a reading of the ‘snippets and shadows’ of homosexuality that remain.     

Team learning in IT implementation projects: Antecedents and consequences

This study investigates the antecedents and consequences of team learning, which is composed of information acquisition, dissemination, and implementation, in information technology (IT) implementation projects. By investigating 129 IT implementation project teams, we found that (1) information acquisition and information dissemination have a positive impact on project outcomes, such as speed-to-users, lower implementation cost, and operational effectiveness, and (2) team behavior and enabler variables, such as teamwork, team communication, interpersonal trust between team members, team commitment, and senior manager support, positively influence team learning. We also found that team anxiety moderates the relationship between team learning and project outcomes.     

The Pacific Science Board in Micronesia: Science,Government, and Conservation on the Post-War Pacific Frontier

This article examines the planningand execution of scientific field work in thepost-war Micronesian Trust Territory, under theaegis of the Pacific Science Board (within theNational Research Council). It argues that thework of the PSB can be characterized as both`big natural history', and routine `frontierscience' in that scientific expertise wasintended to aid in managing the Trust. It alsoexamines the limitations of scientists whostruggled to extend American conservation andpreservation strategies on distant Pacificfrontier territories.     

Students in Australian Catholic and Independent Schools Have More Positive Learning Environments: Evidence From the 2012 PISA Study

Critics of Catholic and independent (nongovernment) schools in Australia contend that the higher levels of performance of students in nongovernment schools can be dismissed as simply a function of student- and especially school-level socioeconomic status (school-SES). A recent article extends this critique to school-sector differences in students’ evaluations of their teachers and schools, arguing that the observable school-sector differences are because of differences in school-SES, not because of school-sector differences in their teachers and schools. In response, this article reviews these arguments and focuses on school-sector differences in students’ evaluations of their teachers and schools using the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation’s (OECD) measures in the PISA 2009 study. On eight of the 10 attitudinal measures, students attending Catholic and independent schools have more positive evaluations and these school-sector differences survive controls for students’ SES, their overall level of achievement and school-SES, which has no substantive influence. Although the effect sizes are generally small (0.06–0.26) their combined influence means that nongovernment school students enjoy superior learning environments which is likely to contribute to their generally higher levels of academic performance in senior secondary school.     

Agricultural and science education: a socio-analysis of their intersection and positions within the educational field

It can be argued that agricultural science is one of the original forms of science education. However, over the past century, agricultural science education has habitually been perceived as an educational venue meant solely for production agriculturalists. When examining modern agricultural education we find it to be a minority within the broader field of science education, contradicting its historically stout scientific standing within the sciences. This educational shift leaves one to ponder the historic development of contemporary agricultural education. To gain deeper insight into these questions we reviewed the historical evolution of agricultural education within the United States. We then examined the professional habitus, or cultural nuances, associated with contemporary agricultural education. Next, we considered potential outcomes associated with the profession embracing post-modern perspectives within mainstream science and community-based education. Finally, we call for critical venues within agriculture education to question the status quo and challenge the acceptance of commonly held views.     

Dependency structure language model for topic detection and tracking

In this paper, we propose a new language model, namely, a dependency structure language model, for topic detection and tracking (TDT) to compensate for weakness of unigram and bigram language models. The dependency structure language model is based on the Chow expansion theory and the dependency parse tree generated by a linguistic parser. So, long-distance dependencies can be naturally captured by the dependency structure language model. We carried out extensive experiments to verify the proposed model on topic tracking and link detection in TDT. In both cases, the dependency structure language models perform better than strong baseline approaches.