Measuring Search Engine Quality

The effectiveness of twenty public search engines is evaluated using TREC-inspired methods and a set of 54 queries taken from real Web search logs. The World Wide Web is taken as the test collection and a combination of crawler and text retrieval system is evaluated. The engines are compared on a range of measures derivable from binary relevance judgments of the first seven live results returned. Statistical testing reveals a significant difference between engines and high intercorrelations between measures. Surprisingly, given the dynamic nature of the Web and the time elapsed, there is also a high correlation between results of this study and a previous study by Gordon and Pathak. For nearly all engines, there is a gradual decline in precision at increasing cutoff after some initial fluctuation. Performance of the engines as a group is found to be inferior to the group of participants in the TREC-8 Large Web task, although the best engines approach the median of those systems. Shortcomings of current Web search evaluation methodology are identified and recommendations are made for future improvements. In particular, the present study and its predecessors deal with queries which are assumed to derive from a need to find a selection of documents relevant to a topic. By contrast, real Web search reflects a range of other information need types which require different judging and different measures.     

The Provision for Personal, Social, Health Education (PSHE) and Citizenship in School-based Elements of Primary Initial Teacher Education

This small-scale research study looks at the PSHE/Citizenship framework and the opportunities for student teachers to understand and experience within school the relationship between values, personal and social development and learning. A questionnaire was given to two sets of student teachers on their final school-based placements. The research suggests that there needs to be greater recognition of the centrality of multi-cultural awareness and understanding within the political literacy section of the PSHE/Citizenship framework. This is the counterpart to a previous study of the opportunities for values education within the university-based elements of Primary Initial Teacher Education ( Mead, 2003 ).     

Peer choice – does reviewer self‐selection work?

The British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) uses a novel system for obtaining referees by e‐mailing the abstracts of submissions to a panel of over 250 referees and allowing these individuals to choose which papers they would like to review. An analysis of 13 experienced referees showed that, of 473 reviews assessed, these referees were slightly more lenient than the editor and that electronic records provide useful data that can be mined in interesting ways.     

弗里德曼:使社会倒退的"自由市场"设计师

2006年11月21日,澳大利亚http://www.wsws.org网站刊登了尼克·比姆斯题为《弗里德曼:使社会倒退的"自由市场"设计师》的文章,认为弗里德曼的理论受到重视不是因为其科学性,而是因为他为垄断资本的全球扩张提供了一个意识形态外衣,他的理论在科学上是一种倒退,而且实际上也导致社会倒退.文章主要内容如下.     

From unbundling to market making: reimagining,reassembling and reinventing the public university

ABSTRACT

In Britain and New Zealand the neoliberal assault on universities has shifted from new public management and funding models to the special status of the public university. The project aims to complete neoliberal business initiated 25 years ago by more fully marketising and financialising universities, starting with ‘unbundling’ and outsourcing and culminating in new forms of privatisation, rent-extraction and rebundling. This paper analyses two documents commissioned beyond government to create political momentum for this project: Avalanche is Coming and The University of the Future. These both capture the zeitgeist of reform while simultaneously creating the university futures that they portend. We examine the market-making work they perform in reimagining and reinventing universities ahead of policy reform. We argue that claims made to support fundamental restructuring of public universities lack substance or evidence. Rather, each is underpinned by different configurations of ideology and self-interest that together envelope universities in new agendas of marketisation, financialisation and privatisation. We suggest that in this latest restructuring of public universities critics should pay more attention to the work of consultancies and think tanks alongside the micro-details of market making. By doing so, they too might reimagine public universities, but for a different political project.     

A comparison of self-focus versus attentional explanations of choking

This study examined attentional processes underlying skilled motor performance in threatening situations. Twenty-four trained participants performed a simulated rally driving task under conditions designed either to direct the focus of attention toward the explicit monitoring of driving or a distracting secondary task. Performance (lap time) was compared with a "driving only" control condition. Each condition was completed under nonevaluative and evaluative instructional sets designed to manipulate anxiety. Mental effort was indexed by self-report and dual-task performance measures. The results showed little change in performance in the high-threat explicit monitoring task condition, compared with either the low-threat or the high-threat distraction conditions. Mental effort increased, however, in all high- as opposed to low-threat conditions. Performance effectiveness was therefore maintained under threat although this was at the expense of reduced processing efficiency. The results provide stronger support for the predictions of processing efficiency theory than self-focus theories of choking.     

Derek Jarman: An Art Educator for Our Times?

Derek Jarman found his life's purpose in art. His significance for art educators today is his combination of low technology film‐making and his painterly vision. He provides a model for us today, in his incorporation of images from daily life into a series of vivid tableaux. Jarman created a huge database of images from which he constantly drew for both paintings and films. He was always writing down ideas and making drawings into a series of sketchbooks which provided him with the raw materials for his artistic products. Jarman's significance for this publication was that he united all aspects of his life into an aesthetic adventure. This included finding a signature as a gay artist who was also a passionate gardener. He also repudiated a literal or narrative structure and any idea of plot. This makes his work both difficult but rewarding.