Improvement of building field association term dictionary using passage retrieval

Field Association (FA) terms are a limited set of discriminating terms that can specify document fields. Document fields can be decided efficiently if there are many relevant FA terms in that documents. An earlier approach built FA terms dictionary using a WWW search engine, but there were irrelevant selected FA terms in that dictionary because that approach extracted FA terms from the whole documents. This paper proposes a new approach for extracting FA terms using passage (portions of a document text) technique rather than extracting them from the whole documents. This approach extracts FA terms more accurately than the earlier approach. The proposed approach is evaluated for 38,372 articles from the large tagged corpus. According to experimental results, it turns out that by using the new approach about 24% more relevant FA terms are appending to the earlier FA term dictionary and around 32% irrelevant FA terms are deleted. Moreover, precision and recall are achieved 98% and 94% respectively using the new approach.     

Exploring the competencies of information professionals for knowledge management in the information institutions of Bangladesh

Aim of the study

The aim of the study is to explore the views of information professionals for knowledge management (KM) in the libraries/information institutions of Bangladesh.

Research questions

This paper seeks to address the following research questions: How the information professionals of Bangladesh perceive the views of KM? What are likely to be the skills required by the information professionals of Bangladesh for KM in the libraries of Bangladesh? and what are likely to be the critical success factors for encouraging KM in the information institutions of Bangladesh?

Method

The methodology includes a quantitative approach. The study has been conducted through a survey using a pre-structured questionnaire. A short and structured questionnaire was sent to 50 information professionals who had been working in different libraries in Bangladesh through email and/or by postal mail. The respondents were selected from six divisions of Bangladesh (25 respondents from Dhaka division, 5 each in Chittagong, Rajshahi, Khulna, Barishal and Sylhet divisions). Out of the 50 individuals sent the survey we received 30 responses, for a response rate 60%.

Findings

The results of the study show that that 93.24% of the respondents first read about KM in the literature, but none had taken any courses on KM. Only 6.76% of the respondents had attended a workshop on KM. Findings also yield most professionals believed that several competencies including those in: communication, facilitation, coaching, mentoring, networking, negotiating, consensus building, and team working were essential for KM in the libraries of Bangladesh. This paper also suggests some critical success factors for encouraging the information professionals to KM in the libraries of Bangladesh. It investigates the original views of the library and information professionals of Bangladesh regarding the skills and competences of information professionals for KM in the libraries of Bangladesh.

Recommendations of the study

The department of Information Science and Library Management of Dhaka University and Rajshahi University should introduce KM course(s) either in the graduate level or in the post-graduate level.     

The effect of industrial training on ethical awareness of final year students in a Malaysian public university

Studies (for example, Dellaportas in Making a difference with a discrete course on accounting ethics. J Bus Ethics 65(4):391–404, 2006; Saat in An investigation of the effects of a moral education program on the ethical development of Malaysian future accountants, 2010) on final year accounting students show that industrial training has a positive impact on the ethical development in a way that students improved in their ethical judgement after attending a 6-month training. Thus, this research aims to evaluate the influence of industrial training in the development of ethical awareness among final year students from a Malaysian public university. These students were from multiple academic backgrounds—engineering, science and social science. A pre and post study was adopted in order to achieve the objectives. A set of survey was distributed to students before and after they have attended industrial training. In assessing students’ ethical awareness, 15 business-related and workplace ethical situations were given and students had to rate their acceptance on these situations from not acceptable (1) to most acceptable (7). From the findings, it can be observed that although the level of ethical awareness among students is fairly good, industrial training has minimal impact in improving or developing students’ ethical awareness. The impact is such because students who undergone industrial training may have observed certain behaviour that they thought are acceptable in a workplace; this may have changed the way students perceived their acceptance on the situations.     

Tide–surge interaction model including air bubble effects for the coast of Bangladesh

An estimate of water levels due to the interaction of tide and surge associated with a storm including air bubble effects is made along the coastal region of Bangladesh. For this purpose, a vertically integrated shallow water model in Cartesian coordinate system is developed introducing air bubbles and is solved using nested finite difference schemes. A fine grid model covering the region between 21°15′N to 23°N and 89°E to 92° E has been nested into a coarse grid model covering the region between 15°N to 23°N and 85°E to 95°E in the Bay of Bengal to incorporate all the major islands and coastal bending accurately. By applying tidal forcing through the southern open boundary of the coarse grid model appropriate tidal conditions are generated in the problem domain. Numerical experiments are performed with the help of the model to simulate water levels due to tide and surge interaction including air bubble effects associated with the tropical storm of April 1991. The model results are found to be reasonable and the model can be found to simulate higher water levels in the presence of air bubbles.     

Telling Them Their Own Stories: Legitimizing sexual and reproductive health education in rural Bangladesh

Most people in Bangladesh are rural, poor and underprivileged. The incidence of sexual disease has increased, but little has been done to educate rural people about sexual and reproductive health. In 1997, a sexual and reproductive health project was initiated within a collaborative research agreement between the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research (ICDDR,B) and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), an indigenous non-governmental organization which pursues integrated rural development strategies. Qualitative in-depth interviews with 65 different women, men, boys and girls revealed significant sexual health problems and a lack of knowledge of sexual and reproductive health. The interviews were transformed into composite problem-solving picture stories and information about sexual and reproductive health. Stories mirrored respondents' interpretations of sexual behavior. Those who had achieved or ascribed legitimacy to talk about sex, e.g. traditional health providers, were trained to utilize the methods and materials. Qualitative evaluations revealed important changes in health providers' self-confidence, business and personal interactions as well as changes in clients' behavior. This project found that sexual and reproductive health education can be integrated into indigenous health activities if the sociocultural context in which sex, relationships, risks, diseases and communication occur is reflected in a program's content and methods. Unquestionably, there is a great need for sex education in rural Bangladesh.     

Statistical learning for OCR error correction

Modern OCR engines incorporate some form of error correction, typically based on dictionaries. However, there are still residual errors that decrease performance of natural language processing algorithms applied to OCR text. In this paper, we present a statistical learning model for post-processing OCR errors, either in a fully automatic manner or followed by minimal user interaction to further reduce error rate. Our model employs web-scale corpora and integrates a rich set of linguistic features. Through an interdependent learning pipeline, our model produces and continuously refines the error detection and suggestion of candidate corrections. Evaluated on a historical biology book with complex error patterns, our model outperforms various baseline methods in the automatic mode and shows an even greater advantage when involving minimal user interaction. Quantitative analysis of each computational step further suggests that our proposed model is well-suited for handling volatile and complex OCR error patterns, which are beyond the capabilities of error correction incorporated in OCR engines.     

Exact solutions for different vorticity functions of couple stress fluids

In this paper, inverse solutions are obtained for the class of 2D steady incompressible couple stress fluid flows. This class consists of flows for which the vorticity distribution is given by △^2ψ=ψ＋f（x,y）. The solutions are obtained by applying the inverse method, which makes certain hypotheses regarding the form of the velocity field and pressure but without making any regarding the boundaries of the domain occupied by the fluid. Inverse solutions are derived for three different forms of f（x,y）.     

Pursuing higher education: adaptation challenges and coping strategies of rural students at urban universities in Bangladesh

Tertiary Education and Management - This study examines how students from rural areas in Bangladesh face particular challenges in adapting to university dormitories in urban areas. There has been...     

‘University is a non-Muslim experience,you know? The experience is as good as it can be’: Satisfied settling in Muslim students’ experiences and implications for Muslim student voice

We report findings from a cross-institutional investigation testing the applicability of a new concept, ‘satisfied settling’, which describes the ways in which students are unconsciously ‘settling for less’ in terms of their university experiences. The context of exploration for this article was that of Muslim students’ experiences as a critical area which has received little previous focus. Our results describe a staged cognitive process undertaken by students to subconsciously excuse institutional failures to support their religious needs by settling for lower levels of satisfaction. The ‘counter stories’ told by 19 Muslim students (via semi-structured interviews) detail how their voices are heard or silenced around the deep importance of religious provisions in their university experiences. Satisfied settling was ultimately found to translate across institutional contexts, and the applicability of the concept is discussed in extending to other marginalised student groups.     

(Re)Searching for the development of a conceptual model of education for citizenship in the context of young people’s globalised mobility in higher education

This paper proposes a conceptual model of education for global citizenship by drawing on the literature on international student mobility for higher education. This model outlines the kinds of competencies and forms of consciousness that education for citizenship should focus upon so as to address the economic and moral dilemmas of living in a globalising world. In an integrative review process, this paper identifies the challenges and opportunities that globalised mobility brings to the lives of young people, the mobilities that higher educational institutions are embracing, the mobility motivations of young students in higher education, and the consequences of this globalised mobility for their present and future life.