Persuasive Advocacy

Librarians need to consider a new approach in order to build more effective advocacy efforts. Building upon the principles developed by Robert Cialdini, a noted social psychologist, the authors suggest that there are six tendencies of human behavior that will positively impact compliance with a request: liking, reciprocity, social proof, authority, consistency and scarcity. In the end, relationships that are built over time are what matter as far as funding decision makers are concerned.     

你可以这样说

连续几期给大家介绍的"你可以这样说",同学们都掌握了吗?下期开始我将给大家介绍电影对白中的地道英语。     

Qualitative evaluation of automatic assignment of keywords to images

In image retrieval, most systems lack user-centred evaluation since they are assessed by some chosen ground truth dataset. The results reported through precision and recall assessed against the ground truth are thought of as being an acceptable surrogate for the judgment of real users. Much current research focuses on automatically assigning keywords to images for enhancing retrieval effectiveness. However, evaluation methods are usually based on system-level assessment, e.g. classification accuracy based on some chosen ground truth dataset. In this paper, we present a qualitative evaluation methodology for automatic image indexing systems. The automatic indexing task is formulated as one of image annotation, or automatic metadata generation for images. The evaluation is composed of two individual methods. First, the automatic indexing annotation results are assessed by human subjects. Second, the subjects are asked to annotate some chosen images as the test set whose annotations are used as ground truth. Then, the system is tested by the test set whose annotation results are judged against the ground truth. Only one of these methods is reported for most systems on which user-centred evaluation are conducted. We believe that both methods need to be considered for full evaluation. We also provide an example evaluation of our system based on this methodology. According to this study, our proposed evaluation methodology is able to provide deeper understanding of the system’s performance.     

Against Conformity: Raphael Samuel

This paper is about the work of the historian and committed intellectual Raphael Samuel, a central figure of the British New Left. It considers his political and intellectual activities over a 30‐year period, and sets them in their changing context. It seeks to argue that in many respects Samuel's work provides means for rethinking educational history and contemporary educational politics.     

A global reset of education

PROSPECTS - As the world looks to the future and ways to safely return to normal, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have a unique opportunity to reset our priorities and redefine what this...     

The challenges of delivering public good in Arab universities: faculty perspectives

The contribution of Arab universities to the public good is being greatly compromised by the political and economic instability of the Arab Spring. To understand the role Arabian universities are playing in the public sphere and their ability to contribute to the public good, we interviewed 74 professors from 14 countries. Analysis of the faculty interviews yielded four major challenges: motivation and rewards for conducting research, security and safety issues, lack of a research infrastructure, and the challenges of international recognition. Our findings suggest universities should focus on the two most critical issues over which they have some control: securing safety for the faculty and creating an effective research infrastructure.     

我国文化产业统计问题研究

面对世界经济的深刻变革,文化产业的勃兴已引起全世界高度关注.大力发展文化产业对我国的极端重要性,要求我们必须尽快建立健全文化产业统计制度.文章围绕建立健全我国文化产业统计制度这一主题,提出了我国文化产业统计的目标、要求以及建立文化产业统计指标体系应遵循的基本原则,具体构筑了我国文化产业统计指标体系,重点构建了测度文化产业科学发展状况统计指标子体系(一系列指数),特别是借鉴引进国际做法设置了"人文发展指数",并指出了完善我国文化产业统计应把握的几个辨证关系.     

Determinants of range effects in face recognition

The effects of test stimulus range on generalization gradients in humans were assessed for discriminations between faces that varied in brightness, faces that varied in orientation in the picture plane, and morphed faces. In Experiment 1, significant range effects, predicted by adaptation level theory, occurred when faces varied along the brightness or orientation dimension, but not for morphed faces. Changing the difficulty of discrimination of both training and test stimuli for Experiment 2 produced range effects in morphed faces. Experiment 3 explored training and testing stimulus factors as determinants of range effects in morphed faces. The results suggest that sufficiently biased testing ranges create shifts in response distributions (generalization gradients), and this may be amplified by using relatively difficult discriminations between training stimuli.