Implications of planning for regional libraries: our underlying philosophy

The National Library of Medicine Extramural Program in administering the Medical Library Assistance Act of 1965 has developed the following specific program objectives: provide financial assistance for improving biomedical libraries; encourage and assist the establishment and functioning of a responsive national biomedical information network by strengthening present biomedical libraries and their interlibrary relationships; and assure that the biomedical library network is linked to related science information systems. The ultimate goal is to develop the role of the library as a full learning resource center for education, research, and service. The regional library program aims to augment present capability of existing medical libraries so that information can be made available more extensively and more rapidly. Comprehensive and thorough advanced planning is a basic element in the development of regional medical libraries.     

Social class, birth order, and newborn experience

Early home experiences of a group of 32 2-week old infants, equally divided according to social class, birth order, and sex, were studied. Naturalistic observations were taken on 2 consecutive days for a total of 6 hours. Compared with later-borns, firstborns received significantly more caretaker interaction on all variables studied. Compared with lower-SES infants, those from higher-SES homes received significantly more direct verbal interaction although the 2 groups did not differ on total periods of other types of caretaking interaction. The findings are consistent with birth order and social class differences reported in home environments of older infants and children.     

Evaluating the fairness of special education hearings.

The U.S. Congress mandated due process hearings in special education disputes to ensure parental involvement in educational decision making and to promote individual justice. The present study explored two kinds of justice, defined as objective and subjective fairness, and examined parent and school officials' subjective experience of the fairness of their hearings. Findings indicate that hearings are not achieving subjective fairness. Neither school officials nor parents felt positively about the experience. Supplements to hearings, such as mediation and negotiation, should be studied to see if they are more effective vehicles for achieving congressional intent and for avoiding costly and emotionally draining hearings.     

Document retrieval on repetitive string collections

Most of the fastest-growing string collections today are repetitive, that is, most of the constituent documents are similar to many others. As these collections keep growing, a key approach to handling them is to exploit their repetitiveness, which can reduce their space usage by orders of magnitude. We study the problem of indexing repetitive string collections in order to perform efficient document retrieval operations on them. Document retrieval problems are routinely solved by search engines on large natural language collections, but the techniques are less developed on generic string collections. The case of repetitive string collections is even less understood, and there are very few existing solutions. We develop two novel ideas, interleaved LCPs and precomputed document lists, that yield highly compressed indexes solving the problem of document listing (find all the documents where a string appears), top-k document retrieval (find the k documents where a string appears most often), and document counting (count the number of documents where a string appears). We also show that a classical data structure supporting the latter query becomes highly compressible on repetitive data. Finally, we show how the tools we developed can be combined to solve ranked conjunctive and disjunctive multi-term queries under the simple \({\textsf{tf}}{\textsf{-}}{\textsf{idf}}\) model of relevance. We thoroughly evaluate the resulting techniques in various real-life repetitiveness scenarios, and recommend the best choices for each case.     

The criterion-related validity of the WISC-R performance scale and other nonverbal IQ tests for deaf children

Despite the popularity of nonverbal IQ tests for psychoeducational assessment of deaf children, criterion-related validity is lacking. This may be because nonverbal IQ tests lack criterion-related validity, or because inappropriate scaling attenuates IQ achievement correlations. Two studies used samples of deaf children to test these hypotheses. The first study (N = 33) correlated WISC-R PIQs with Stanford Achievement Test-Hearing Impaired Edition (SAT-HI) grade equivalents and age-based percentiles (rs less than .37, NS). The second study (N = 64) correlated nonverbal IQs from many tests with SAT-HI scores (rs .05 to .42). The results implicate the hypothesis that criterion scale affects IQ-achievement correlations. The role of nonverbal IQ in the psychoeducational assessment of deaf children is discussed.     

Information-analytical support of priority fields in science and technology: Branch and differentiated approaches

This paper considers the urgent problems of information-analytical support of Russian scientific technological and innovation policy, as well as modern tasks of information-analytical support of the innovation activities of scientific and educational organizations, and proposes methodical approaches that have potential for improving the Russian system of patent searches and analytics. It is shown to be expedient to build complex information-retrieval systems with maximum access to relevant arrays of branch information and multi-service analytical components, which make it possible to implement the differentiated approach to consumers and a diversity of scenarios of scientific information activities, which are particular to different groups of consumers.