Counterfeit museology

Museums are not usually seen to be agents of change. If they are to serve as important mechanisms for empowering local communities to define, recognize, and develop their own indigenous heritages, they should first consider a potential contradiction contained within this initiative: museums specialize in the representation of other peoples, while people have the sovereign right to represent themselves. Left unresolved, this contradiction could produce counterfeits of good intentions. The introduction of professionalized cultural management may mitigate the responsibilities of the citizenry to actively participate in the production and preservation of their own heritage.     

Communicating Prevention: The Effects of the keepin' it REAL Classroom Videotapes and Televised PSAs on Middle-School Students' Substance Use

This study sought to determine if exposure to two communication-oriented activities, videotapes and public service announcements, accounts for changes in substance use among adolescents participating in the Drug Resistance Strategies Project's keepin' it REAL adolescent substance use prevention curriculum. Middle-school students (4,734, 72% Latino) responded to questionnaires related to these analyses. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) model was fit separately to six substance use outcomes. The results suggested that intervention students who saw four or five videos engaged in less substance use in the past month than did students who saw fewer videos. Having seen the PSAs one or more times did not predict the reported change in substance use.     

Editorial

This issue of the Journal contains three interesting articlesabout central aspects of public opinion research, as well asan equal number of research notes that reflect the range oftopics that interest all public opinion researchers. Toshio Takeshita takes a turn at reconceptualizing agenda-settingstudies, using a taxonomy     

Character N-Gram Tokenization for European Language Text Retrieval

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum has encouraged research in text retrieval methods for numerous European languages and has developed durable test suites that allow language-specific techniques to be investigated and compared. The labor associated with crafting a retrieval system that takes advantage of sophisticated linguistic methods is daunting. We examine whether language-neutral methods can achieve accuracy comparable to language-specific methods with less concomitant software complexity. Using the CLEF 2002 test set we demonstrate empirically how overlapping character n-gram tokenization can provide retrieval accuracy that rivals the best current language-specific approaches for European languages. We show that n = 4 is a good choice for those languages, and document the increased storage and time requirements of the technique. We report on the benefits of and challenges posed by n-grams, and explain peculiarities attendant to bilingual retrieval. Our findings demonstrate clearly that accuracy using n-gram indexing rivals or exceeds accuracy using unnormalized words, for both monolingual and bilingual retrieval.     

Organizational Power and the Institutional Review Board

In this essay, we respond to the narratives and essays in this issue by examining organizational power issues related to researchers and institutional research boards (IRBs). Rather than taking a singular perspective on power, we use multiple perspectives and suggest that the cumulative analyses provide the best understanding of IRBs and organizational power.