Faculty Employment Trends in Criminology and Criminal Justice

The academic job search process is perhaps one of the most important and stressful events for scholars hoping to gain full‐time employment in academia. The stress that this process induces is due, at least in part, to the fact that candidates are forced to make important, life‐changing decisions with very little information. The goal of the present study is to provide an update on faculty employment trends in criminology and criminal justice by examining faculty position announcements posted in The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) from August 2004 to July 2009. Findings reveal that candidates seeking assistant professor positions will have the most choice, as positions posted at this rank make up the largest category of advertisements. Furthermore, when a specialization was included in the announcement, most departments sought those with a law enforcement focus, followed by generalists.     

How Have Concepts of Informal Learning Developed Over Time?

Although the current interest in informal learning seems recent, performance improvement professionals have long had an interest in informal learning‐the ways that people learn outside of formal structures. The earliest forms of learning for work were informal, including de facto and formal apprenticeship programs and the “school of life.” Contemporary interest began in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of self‐directed learning. In the 1970s and 1980s, focus shifted to adult learning theory and human performance technology, both of which explore the roles of interventions other than classroom learning. The early 1990s brought two practical applications—electronic performance support systems and edutainment—followed by a third in the late 1990s—knowledge management. Discussions of informal learning arose in the 2000s. Each movement offers practical lessons for designing informal learning today.     

我国国际职业足球运动员合同违约纠纷解决关涉的主要法律问题 ——以巴里奥斯案为例

近年来,国内频发的国际职业足球运动员合同违约纠纷已成为社会各界关注的热点问题。许多国内俱乐部在国际球员合同违约纠纷中败诉 或赔偿,巴里奥斯案是国内俱乐部第1次在国际球员合同违约纠纷中获胜并得到高额赔偿的案件。通过巴里奥斯案对国际球员合同违约纠纷所涉 及的争议管辖、法律适用、赔偿及裁决的执行等问题进行分析,国际足球职业球员合同违约纠纷受国际足联或国际体育仲裁院管辖;国际足联、国际 体育仲裁院的相关规则和判例都是处理此类纠纷的重要依据;国际足联、国际体育仲裁院对国际球员合同违约赔偿计算有明确的规定,也在判例中 形成了一定的计算原则,并阐述了赔偿金额计算的影响因素;职业足球已形成强大的行业体系,一般来说,国际足联、国际体育仲裁院决定都能得到 很好的执行。因此,国内的国际足球运动员合同违约纠纷一般向国际足联或国际体育仲裁院申诉,掌握和充分运用国际足联和国际体育仲裁院的 规则及判例是国内足球俱乐部解决国际球员合同违约纠纷的关键。赔偿的计算除了需要掌握相关规则及判例外,还要了解赔偿金额的影响因素, 对于国际足联、国际体育仲裁院的决定在国内的执行则无须疑虑。此外,遵守相关法律和规则,并及时有效地处理纠纷也是国内俱乐部在处理合同 违约争议中有效维护自身权益的重要方面。     

Relevance-based language modelling for recommender systems

Relevance-Based Language Models, commonly known as Relevance Models, are successful approaches to explicitly introduce the concept of relevance in the statistical Language Modelling framework of Information Retrieval. These models achieve state-of-the-art retrieval performance in the pseudo relevance feedback task. On the other hand, the field of recommender systems is a fertile research area where users are provided with personalised recommendations in several applications. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of the Relevance Modelling framework to effectively suggest recommendations to a user. We also propose a probabilistic clustering technique to perform the neighbour selection process as a way to achieve a better approximation of the set of relevant items in the pseudo relevance feedback process. These techniques, although well known in the Information Retrieval field, have not been applied yet to recommender systems, and, as the empirical evaluation results show, both proposals outperform individually several baseline methods. Furthermore, by combining both approaches even larger effectiveness improvements are achieved.     

Measuring Personal Networks and Their Relationship with Scientific Production

The analysis of social networks has remained a crucial and yet understudied aspect of the efforts to measure Triple Helix linkages. The Triple Helix model aims to explain, among other aspects of knowledge-based societies, “the current research system in its social context” (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000:109). This paper develops a novel approach to study the research system from the perspective of the individual, through the analysis of the relationships among researchers, and between them and other social actors. We develop a new set of techniques and show how they can be applied to the study of a specific case (a group of academics within a university department). We analyse their informal social networks and show how a relationship exists between the characteristics of an individual’s network of social links and his or her research output.     

Legitimising inequality? The governance of ‘Others’ through participatory initiatives in schools

This article discusses how the call for families’ active participation in school can be understood as a form of regulatory act producing neoliberal subjectivities based on responsibility, entrepreneurship and rational calculation. The analysis draws on the results of two projects aiming to improve the relationship between families of Spanish Roma and immigrant background and the school. Results suggest that the idea of participation is presented as an element for the transformation of the schools. Nevertheless, the programmes are implemented without questioning the power structure present in school, and so put even more responsibility on the families, and make more visible their supposed deficits. Approaching participation as a key feature of neoliberal governmentality, our analysis highlights how these participatory initiatives foster a type of assimilationist diversity approach and legitimise the existing status quo in schools.     

Building user profiles based on sequences for content and collaborative filtering

Modeling user profiles is a necessary step for most information filtering systems – such as recommender systems – to provide personalized recommendations. However, most of them work with users or items as vectors, by applying different types of mathematical operations between them and neglecting sequential or content-based information. Hence, in this paper we study how to propose an adaptive mechanism to obtain user sequences using different sources of information, allowing the generation of hybrid recommendations as a seamless, transparent technique from the system viewpoint. As a proof of concept, we develop the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) algorithm as a similarity metric to compare the user sequences, where, in the process of adapting this algorithm to recommendation, we include different parameters to control the efficiency by reducing the information used in the algorithm (preference filter), to decide when a neighbor is considered useful enough to be included in the process (confidence filter), to identify whether two interactions are equivalent (δ-matching threshold), and to normalize the length of the LCS in a bounded interval (normalization functions). These parameters can be extended to work with any type of sequential algorithm.We evaluate our approach with several state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms using different evaluation metrics measuring the accuracy, diversity, and novelty of the recommendations, and analyze the impact of the proposed parameters. We have found that our approach offers a competitive performance, outperforming content, collaborative, and hybrid baselines, and producing positive results when either content- or rating-based information is exploited.     

Enhancing the participation of immigrant families in schools through Intermediary Organizations? The case of Parents’ Associations in Catalonia

This paper discusses the results of an action-research project developed in a federation of Parents Associations (PAs) in Catalonia, aimed at helping PAs involve immigrant families. First, I nuance the idea of participation in schools to highlight some of the problems associated with participative initiatives targeting ‘hard to reach’ parents. Then, I borrow the notion of Intermediary Organizations (IOs) to assess in what ways PAs may be able to become a valuable resource to help schools involve immigrant parents. In this regard, I analyse the situation of Pas located in multicultural contexts. Then, three specific PA projects are discussed to illustrate PA’s strengths and weaknesses when leading their own projects. In conclusion, I argue that, in order to work as truly IOs, PAs must: (a) build on the experiences of successful PAs leading projects; (b) strengthen their organizational closure; and (c) lessen their responsibility to carry on important school services.