Education Under the New Modernisers: an agenda for centralisation,illiberalism and inequality?

This article surveys changes at the economic, philosophic, social and political levels to argue that a new agenda for educational policy is taking place in the western world, particularly in the UK and the USA. Driven by the needs for a high tech rather than a low wage economy, by perceived breakdown in the social fabric of society (partly as a consequence of previous New Right policies) and with an underpinning argument at the philosophic level which argues for a new orientation to the conception of the nature of moral thinking, this article argues that what is emerging is an approach to education based upon the notions of communitarianism and character education. Whilst such an approach has the potential to re‐invigorate individuals’ sense of responsibility to their communities, as well as provide a greater sense of meaning and direction to policy aims, it is argued in this article that it also has the possibility of centralising decision making, of increasing the likelihood of illiberalism towards minority beliefs and of neglecting present needs of the underprivileged. It concludes by suggesting that whilst many of these ideas originated in the USA, paradoxically they are likely to have their greatest effect in the UK     

Reinventing the marketing machine

The rhythm of publishers’ marketing efforts is dictated by an entirely outmoded historic model of publication of seasonal lists. Publishers should recognize that market conditions that drove this cycle are long gone and adjust to the realities of the 1990s. Properly used, many of today’s technology tools can assist publishers in building and exploiting the “communities of interest” that are the stock-in-trade of every book marketer. Mike Shatzkin is co-chairman of the VISTA Editorial Board. His Idea Logical company produces content for Sportsline USA web sites. Address for correspondence     

Effect of Twinning on Chinese and English Vocabulary Knowledge

Vocabulary knowledge was tested in a native (Cantonese-Chinese) and foreign (English) language in 150 twins and 150 singletons aged 6–11 years, matched on age, gender, grade level, nonverbal intelligence, parents’ education, family income, and number of siblings and household members. The singletons clearly outperformed the twins on the native vocabulary, but this “twinning effect” was much less noticeable for the foreign vocabulary. The effect on English vocabulary was further reduced after exposure to English at home was controlled. Given that these participants learned most of their English in school rather than home, the present findings support the notion that the twinning effect is associated with increased competition for family interaction in twins compared with singletons.     

Indianapolis I3: the third generation Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems.

In 2001, the Regenstrief Institute for Health Care and the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) began an IAIMS planning effort to create a vision and a tactical plan for the first Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS) implementation to cross a large area and include unaffiliated institutions. A number of elements made this planning effort unique. Among these elements were the existence of a network infrastructure that supported the Indianapolis Network for Patient Care, the existence of a mature medical informatics program at the Regenstrief Institute, and the existence of a wide-area knowledge network fostered by the IUSM libraries. However, the leadership for a strong information technology role in the IUSM that could promote collaboration in support of education and research across the diverse Indianapolis hospital systems had been lacking. By bringing together various groups, each with a commitment to improve health care quality and public health across the Indianapolis metropolitan area, regardless of individual institutional affiliation, the strategic directions for I3-Indianapolis IAIMS Initiative have been defined and the foundations for a third generation IAIMS construct have been laid in Indianapolis, Indiana.     

Mass Media Production Guides

William Hawes' The Performer in Mass Media in Media Professions and in the Community (New York: Hastings House, 1978—$15.75/8.95)

Robert L. Hilliard, ed. Television Broadcasting: An Introduction (New York: Hastings House, 1978— $15.75/7.95)

Charles Bensinger's The Video Guide (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Video-Info Publications (P.O. Box 1507), 1977— $11.95, paper)

Mike Wolverton's And Now the News (Houston, Tex.: Gulf Publishing Co., 1977— $10.95)

The WAFL Book: A Guide to Film and Video in the Washington, D.C. Area (Washington Area Filmmakers League, P.O. Box 6475, Washington, D.C. 20009 —$5.45, including postage, paper)

David E. Fear's Technical Writing (New York: Random House, 1978—price not given, paper)     

Dimensions: A competitor to Scopus and the Web of Science?

Dimensions is a partly free scholarly database launched by Digital Science in January 2018. Dimensions includes journal articles and citation counts, making it a potential new source of impact data. This article explores the value of Dimensions from an impact assessment perspective with an examination of Food Science research 2008–2018 and a random sample of 10,000 Scopus articles from 2012. The results include high correlations between citation counts from Scopus and Dimensions (0.96 by narrow field in 2012) as well as similar average counts. Almost all Scopus articles with DOIs were found in Dimensions (97% in 2012). Thus, the scholarly database component of Dimensions seems to be a plausible alternative to Scopus and the Web of Science for general citation analyses and for citation data in support of some types of research evaluations.     

Mining knowledge from natural language texts using fuzzy associated concept mapping

Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have been successfully used to automatically extract information from unstructured text through a detailed analysis of their content, often to satisfy particular information needs. In this paper, an automatic concept map construction technique, Fuzzy Association Concept Mapping (FACM), is proposed for the conversion of abstracted short texts into concept maps. The approach consists of a linguistic module and a recommendation module. The linguistic module is a text mining method that does not require the use to have any prior knowledge about using NLP techniques. It incorporates rule-based reasoning (RBR) and case based reasoning (CBR) for anaphoric resolution. It aims at extracting the propositions in text so as to construct a concept map automatically. The recommendation module is arrived at by adopting fuzzy set theories. It is an interactive process which provides suggestions of propositions for further human refinement of the automatically generated concept maps. The suggested propositions are relationships among the concepts which are not explicitly found in the paragraphs. This technique helps to stimulate individual reflection and generate new knowledge. Evaluation was carried out by using the Science Citation Index (SCI) abstract database and CNET News as test data, which are well known databases and the quality of the text is assured. Experimental results show that the automatically generated concept maps conform to the outputs generated manually by domain experts, since the degree of difference between them is proportionally small. The method provides users with the ability to convert scientific and short texts into a structured format which can be easily processed by computer. Moreover, it provides knowledge workers with extra time to re-think their written text and to view their knowledge from another angle.