Human information seeking: Online searching of bibliographic citation networks

The strategies, heuristics, and tradeoff?s involved in online searching of bibliographic citation networks are discussed. Results from the field of citation analysis are used to describe the mathematical structure of citation networks. An experimental environment called DBASE (Data Base Access and Search Environment) is discussed and its use in two studies of human information seeking behavior considered. Variables examined in these studies included the nature of the search question and the interconnectivity of the data base.     

JUDAIC STUDIES: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY MODEL

An interdisciplinary approach to any body of knowledge necessarily involves a confluence of diverse scholarly interests and distinct areas of expertise. The study of Judaism lends itself precisely to such interdisciplinarity, and is especially appropriate for an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum.     

��I WAS TOLD IT WAS GOING TO BE HARD WORK BUT I WASN��T TOLD IT WAS GOING TO BE THIS MUCH WORK��: THE EXPERIENCES AND ASPIRATIONS OF UNDERGRADUATE SCIENCE STUDENTS

The recruitment and training of scientists is an area of international concern. Much of the research and policy focus around this issue in the UK has been on how science is taught in schools and in particular on the structure of the school science curriculum. Much less attention has been devoted to the undergraduate student experience and the trajectory that learners take which can lead to higher education and into careers as professional scientists and technicians. This paper reports the findings from a comparative study of the experiences and aspirations of almost 1,000 art and science undergraduates studying at 6 elite British universities. There is no evidence to suggest that undergraduate scientists are put off a career in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field, although theirs is arguably a less positive experience than that of their peers who study arts subjects. Most science undergraduates have clear career aspirations which are largely linked to remaining in the field and often involve further study. For many, these aspirations lead them towards the applied sciences and away from a career in ‘pure’ research or academia.     

ORIENTATIONS TO PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION: UNDERSTANDING THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO PD OUTCOMES ACROSS MULTIPLE PROJECTS

Given the large investment in teacher professional development (PD), further understanding of the factors that impact PD success is needed. In a previous study, the authors established a framework for categorizing PD projects using the notion of orientations. A PD orientation is comprised of project characteristics that drive the PD design and implementation for that project. In this study, we applied this orientation framework to 14 science and mathematics PD projects and examined the relationship between projects of differing orientations and PD outcomes (e.g. perceived improvement in teaching practices). The results provide support for the value of the framework and demonstrate that PD projects with different orientations exhibit differing participant outcomes. This study also provides evidence of the value of this research framework for understanding how PD implementation characteristics are related to PD outcomes, as well as points to the value of a “balanced” orientation where both content and pedagogy are addressed in equal parts.     

The 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science presented to Aravind Joshi

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science to Aravind Joshi for his fundamental contributions to natural language processing technology and to cognitive science, including particularly the development of the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) family of formalisms and tractable polynomial time algorithms that analyze the complex, varied surface word orders of human languages while simultaneously recovering local elementary syntactic domains corresponding to meaning. In addition, Joshi has been a major collaborator on a new theory of discourse coherence that has influenced all subsequent work on anaphora resolution, and is currently applying TAG to address modeling problems in the life sciences.