The internet

Conclusion Despite the claims of some, listservs do not supplant the need for professional print journals. Most messages are short (5,000 bytes, the equivalent of one single-spaced page, is considered lengthy) and revolve around useful day-to-day professional information exchanges. This type of information is valuable and extremely useful-where else can one post a plea for advice which will be read by hundreds of professional peers within 24 hours? However, there is no reason why this same vehicle cannot be used to substantively examine the professional literature and facilitate reporting on talks and/or sessions from professional meetings. Given the wide scope of cultural and organizational institutions employing list subscribers, listservs provide a fertile forum for communication on user populations. A more robust understanding of our clientele and the sharing of data about them will allow our professions to more propitiously position ourselves both within society and with those with the power of the purse.     

Neural information retrieval: at the end of the early years

A recent “third wave” of neural network (NN) approaches now delivers state-of-the-art performance in many machine learning tasks, spanning speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. Because these modern NNs often comprise multiple interconnected layers, work in this area is often referred to as deep learning. Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of research into NN-based approaches to information retrieval (IR). A significant body of work has now been created. In this paper, we survey the current landscape of Neural IR research, paying special attention to the use of learned distributed representations of textual units. We highlight the successes of neural IR thus far, catalog obstacles to its wider adoption, and suggest potentially promising directions for future research.     

The prediction of academic and clinical performance in medical school

Prior studies have suggested the importance of distinguishing between performance in the earlier and later years of medical education. Factor analysis of grades by year and faculty ratings of clinical and general medical competence for 661 medical students identified two uncorrelated factors clearly reflecting this distinction. The clinical performance factor, accounting for 48% of the communality of the matrix, was more or less unpredictable from aptitude and premedical academic achievement indices; it was marginally predictable from scales on the Adjective Check List. The academic performance factor, accounting for 31% of the variance among criteria, was forecast with acceptable accuracy (cross-validated R=0.43) by equations based on the Medical College Admission Test and premedical grade point average. Future study should stress the clinical performance factor; this criterion appears to be more important than academic attainment, and it is also less accurately predicted by current measures.     

Notes on Contributors

Concepts adapted from structuration theory are employed to analyse how a disjunction has been created and sustained between the form taken by annual development plans for schools and a more flexible approach to planning that appears, from small‐scale research, to be effective at school level. The interest of LEAs and central government in a high degree of external control over school development is interpreted as contradictory to the interest at school level in maintaining a high degree of control over internal development. It is argued that action according to these contradictory interests has not led to conflict because completion of the plan has been kept largely separate from ongoing strategic planning at school level. The concepts employed in this analysis are defined, features of LEA development plans for schools are discussed, research evidence on development planning is summarized, and unintended consequences of development plans as a form of bureaucratic control are suggested.     

Recovery of conditioned fear by a single postextinction shock: Effect of similarity of shock contexts and of time following extinction

Subjects in six experimental groups (n = 16 each) received one-trial passive avoidance (PA) training in which shock was delivered upon movement from a white wooden floor compartment to a black grid compartment. Then fear was extinguished (30 min) in the black compartment. After either 24 or 168 h, all the groups were treated in a room distinctively different from the training room. At each interval, one group received a shock in an apparatus similar to the conditioning box, another received a shock in a dissimilar apparatus, and another was placed in a neutral box. A PA test trial in the training apparatus indicated reinstatement of extinguished fear in all the groups given a postextinction shock except the 24-h dissimilar group. Control groups revealed that the extinction treatment was effective and that spontaneous recovery was not evident. The results were explained in terms of classical conditioning, stimulus generalization, and the broadening (flattening) of stimulus generalization gradients with time.