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.     

Analysis of Statistical Question Classification for Fact-Based Questions

Question classification systems play an important role in question answering systems and can be used in a wide range of other domains. The goal of question classification is to accurately assign labels to questions based on expected answer type. Most approaches in the past have relied on matching questions against hand-crafted rules. However, rules require laborious effort to create and often suffer from being too specific. Statistical question classification methods overcome these issues by employing machine learning techniques. We empirically show that a statistical approach is robust and achieves good performance on three diverse data sets with little or no hand tuning. Furthermore, we examine the role different syntactic and semantic features have on performance. We find that semantic features tend to increase performance more than purely syntactic features. Finally, we analyze common causes of misclassification error and provide insight into ways they may be overcome.     

谁改变了我们的常识?——美国教育保守主义运动与教育不平等

本文考察和分析了美国教育走向保守主义的趋势及其所引发的冲突和斗争。美国教育政策的保守趋势运动是多元的,存在着不同的取向,主要有四种力量构成新自由主义、新保守主义、威权民粹主义和正处在上升阶段的由专业人员和管理人员所构成的新中产阶级。本文侧重探讨了保守主义在改造美国教育的运动中居于领导地位的前两支力量,并认为在教育和社会政策领域,这些力量成功地构建成一个联盟,该联盟成功的重要原因在于对常识的改造,作者将之称为“保守主义的现代化”。