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.     

Hierarchical clustering of a Finnish newspaper article collection with graded relevance assessments

Search facilitated with agglomerative hierarchical clustering methods was studied in a collection of Finnish newspaper articles (N = 53,893). To allow quick experiments, clustering was applied to a sample (N = 5,000) that was reduced with principal components analysis. The dendrograms were heuristically cut to find an optimal partition, whose clusters were compared with each of the 30 queries to retrieve the best-matching cluster. The four-level relevance assessment was collapsed into a binary one by (A) considering all the relevant and (B) only the highly relevant documents relevant, respectively. Single linkage (SL) was the worst method. It created many tiny clusters, and, consequently, searches enabled with it had high precision and low recall. The complete linkage (CL), average linkage (AL), and Ward's methods (WM) returned reasonably-sized clusters typically of 18–32 documents. Their recall (A: 27–52%, B: 50–82%) and precision (A: 83–90%, B: 18–21%) was higher than and comparable to those of the SL clusters, respectively. The AL and WM clustering had 1–8% better effectiveness than nearest neighbor searching (NN), and SL and CL were 1–9% less efficient that NN. However, the differences were statistically insignificant. When evaluated with the liberal assessment A, the results suggest that the AL and WM clustering offer better retrieval ability than NN. Assessment B renders the AL and WM clustering better than NN, when recall is considered more important than precision. The results imply that collections in the highly inflectional and agglutinative languages, such as Finnish, may be clustered as the collections in English, provided that documents are appropriately preprocessed.