Controlling the field of academic economics in Hungary, 1953–1976

Conclusions On the basis of these findings, I suggest that the structure and organisation of the field of Hungarian economics under state socialism should be described as a case of partitioned bureaucracy.⁹ The compromise between research economists and the political elite in the New Course era between 1953 and 1955¹⁰ survived the post-1956 reaction in so far as political economy, with its predominantly legitimatory and ideological functions, remained partitioned from the other sectors in the field through the remainder of the state-socialist period. This secured considerable protection both for Marxist-Leninist political economy—which faced the destabilising effects of exposure to the findings of serious empirical research—and for the other sectors, which were professionally oriented and earnestly interested in the pursuit of unbiased empirical research, free from stifling agitprop interference. Our data concerning the reputational control of the field reflects only one, although very important, aspect of this partitioning. Another and much plainer aspect is that, from the early 1960s, the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee no longer exercised control over the field, except in the political economy sector.The proposition about the mechanism paradigm should not be taken seriously as a statement of a Kuhnian type of intellectual organisation of Hungarian economics, with reform economics at its hard theoretical core. But it should certainly be taken seriously as a reflection of the sociopolitical structure which emerged and developed from the mid-1950s onwards. Neither the politicians nor the economists saw as necessary or even contemplated the integration of Hungarian economic research with Western mainstream economic thought. In exchange for the professional expertise and socio-economic intelligence necessary for the exercise of power, Hungary's state-socialist political class offered their economists relative autonomy and freedom from interference. The price the economists had to pay was partly to refrain from openly and systematically challenging the beliefs perpetuated by the political economy of socialism, and partly to accept in their research the paramountcy of policy orientation. But this burden they assumed willingly since it made them the only group within Hungary's academic intelligentsia—indeed, the only group in Hungarian society outside the political class—with the privilege of being coopted to the institutions with power over some restricted domains of policymaking. After 1989, especially under the conservative Antall government, this proved less than advantageous.¹¹ Although the benevolence of many critics is open to question, it could greatly benefit the field if the economists' expulsion from contemporary politics went hand in hand with provision of the material, intellectual and institutional conditions for a new approach where a fundamentally scientific orientation is paramount.     

Multilingual modeling of cross-lingual spelling variants

Technical term translations are important for cross-lingual information retrieval. In many languages, new technical terms have a common origin rendered with different spelling of the underlying sounds, also known as cross-lingual spelling variants (CLSV). To find the best CLSV in a text database index, we contribute a formulation of the problem in a probabilistic framework, and implement this with an instance of the general edit distance using weighted finite-state transducers. Some training data is required when estimating the costs for the general edit distance. We demonstrate that after some basic training our new multilingual model is robust and requires little or no adaptation for covering additional languages, as the model takes advantage of language independent transliteration patterns. We train the model with medical terms in seven languages and test it with terms from varied domains in six languages. Two test languages are not in the training data. Against a large text database index, we achieve 64–78 % precision at the point of 100% recall. This is a relative improvement of 22% on the simple edit distance.     

Books are silent ambassadors: The Noma award for the translation of Japanese literature

Summary Now more than ever good translations are proving to be vitally important to fulfilling Shoichi Noma’s mission of advancing good relationships between cultures. With the emergence of dozens of world-class Japanese writers, the translators of Japanese literature have acquired a new significance and a new importance. No longer are they required to simply handle the language like an exotic and precious commodity but they must prepare a writer’s work to compete with literature from around the globe and let others understand the issues at their very heart of the Japanese people. Indeed, the selection committee’s choice of Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an apt example of how literature at its very best can span cultural divides to promote mutual understanding of very complicated and important world issues. Written for Japanese to help them understand the devastation of war, it is a rare and timely book that confronts Japan’s experience head on. Ironically, Noma’s idea that books are silent ambassadors, an idea born from agony and defeat, so many years later is helping the world come together towards a unified vision of peace and understanding. “Literature has been described as a means of exchange between the hearts of people. Literary translation, then, is the building of bridges so that all peoples of the world can interact in this way.” Ye Weiqu, Chinese Institute of Social Studies.     

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.     

Sustainability of independent community archives in China: a case study

There are three models for community archives in China. The first one is where community archives are kept in government-funded/government-established museums or archives. The second is where community archives are kept by scholarly organizations such as universities. The third involves the community establishing its own archive. This last model is very unusual in China. The PiCun Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Labor (PCMML) provides an example of this model as it is the only independent community archives focusing on migrant workers in China. This paper explores the emergence and development of PCMML, its impact on community members and challenges faced including funding and staffing, but also those unique to China—PCMML is greatly influenced by a range of national and local government policies and regulations. Conclusions are that survival strategies for independent community archives in China are dependent on three dimensions: the community itself, society and the government. Cultural consciousness of the community is the premise for the establishment and sustainability of independent community archives, and independent community archives can be the public space to cultivate cultural consciousness of community members and thus activates community members’ agency to document, preserve and disseminate their own history. At the same time, independent community archives also need to engage with broader society to avoid involution and gain support and understanding. Independent community archives are constrained by government policies and regulations, so it is essential for them to develop strategic relationships with government.     

International Collaboration and Openness in Jordanian Research Output: A 10-year Publications Feedback

Previous reports stressed on the importance of international collaboration and open access (OA) publishing, as they increase the quality of the research and increase its benefits. In this study, we will assess Jordanian international research collaboration and OA publishing in the past 10 years. We performed a Scopus search for Jordanian publications in the years 2008–2017, where we extracted and calculated the total number of publications, publications in OA journals, publications with international collaborations. Moreover, we assessed the disciplines Jordanians usually publish in. During the 10-year interval, we found a total of 20,359 Jordan-affiliated publications indexed in Scopus. We found a dramatic increase in number of publications with international collaboration from 38% in 2008 reaching 53.3% in 2017, and an increase in OA publications from 7.3% of the total publications in 2008, reaching 18.7% of the total publications in 2017. Total number of Scopus indexed publications from Jordan has increased by 57.9% over the past 10 years. Although international collaboration and OA publications have dramatically increased in recent years, Jordanian researchers should focus more on international collaboration with developed countries and on self-archiving their publications.     

The Dynamic Landscape of Marketing Children’s Books: Publishers Find Consistent Success Through a Combination of Online and Traditional Marketing to Adults and Children

There are a number of challenges unique to the children’s book sector faced by publishers in today’s digitally-dominant business market, making it more crucial than ever for children’s book marketers to create multifaceted marketing plans that include differing but complementary approaches. Among the common marketing challenges specific to children’s books are overabundance of content, competition, access to the library market, the digital versus print dichotomy, difficulty of marketing directly to young readers on the Internet, and the dual (child and adult) target audience. While some marketing tactics must effectively attract the attention of the child reader, it is of fundamental importance (with some exceptions) for publishers, authors, and marketers of children’s books to also ensure their marketing techniques target the adult gatekeepers who are likely to purchase those books. Depending upon various factors, including age range of the reader and subject matter, marketers of children’s books are most successful when applying a mix of traditional and digital marketing techniques.     

Features of Islamic Children’s Books in English: A Case Study of Books Published in Malaysia

The purpose of this study is to investigate the elements of Islamic children’s books that are written in English by focusing on books that are available in the Malaysian market and published in Malaysia. This study applies the content analysis method, by examining the selected books of their subject matter as well as the language. The results of the study reveal that Islamic books written for children in English are distinctive in terms of the content and language features.