Comparative analysis of OECD member countries’ competitive advantage in National Human Resource Development system

The purpose of this study was to assess, evaluate, and compare the competitive advantages of the human resource development systems of advanced countries. The Global Human Resource Development Index was utilized for this study, since it has been validated through an expert panel’s content review and analytic hierarchy process. Using a sample of 34 OECD member countries, the following conclusions were drawn. First, Switzerland, Sweden, and United States ranked top three in order in National Human Resource Development (NHRD) competitiveness and such Nordic countries as Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland showed outstanding NHRD competitiveness. Second, thirty-four countries differed significantly in key aspects of supply, demand, environment, and supporting systems of NHRD. Strong, intermediate, and weak groups classified based on NHRD competitiveness significantly differed from one another in all factors of the NHRD system. Third, changes in NHRD competitiveness between 2005 and 2011 did not exhibit specific patterns depending on the level of economic development. Fourth, little changes in NHRD system occurred in a short period of time. The most significant positive changes in NHRD competitiveness were identified in only two cases of Luxemburg (△6) and Poland (△6) among 34 countries. Only striking case of decrease in NHRD competitiveness was Israel (▽6). The findings of this research will be able to assist each country in identifying its strengths and weaknesses in the NHRD system.     

Educational Publishing in China: Status Quo,Problems and Counter Measures

In China, educational publishing is devoted to publishing mainly textbooks and teaching materials. For a long time, education publishing has dominated others in China’s publishing industry. However, after entering the new century, especially in the last 2 years, there has been the impact of changes in the College-Entrance Examination, the Invitation to Bid for Compilation and Publication of Textbooks, government procurement and Scientific and Technological Advancement for supplementary books. Therefore, publishing for education has been losing its previous major role and dominance. For making a leap forward and breakthrough in educational publication, we must open up a new train of thought for the development of educational publishing, we need three distinct transformations: first, change in publishing mode from extensive to intensive growth. Second, transformation from variety-scale to market-scale expansion. Third, transformation from being just a provider of content to one providing both content and services.     

Comparison of Alternative Channels in Cross Media Publishing

This paper attempts a direct comparison of the available alternative channels that can be employed in a cross media publishing scheme. More precisely it examines the content, the publishing speed, and the rhythm of the publishing channels. Interesting conclusions are drawn concerning the characteristics of each channel. A new publishing channel is proposed in order to allow newspapers to directly compete with radio and TV channels.     

Negation recognition in medical narrative reports

Substantial medical data, such as discharge summaries and operative reports are stored in electronic textual form. Databases containing free-text clinical narratives reports often need to be retrieved to find relevant information for clinical and research purposes. The context of negation, a negative finding, is of special importance, since many of the most frequently described findings are such. When searching free-text narratives for patients with a certain medical condition, if negation is not taken into account, many of the documents retrieved will be irrelevant. Hence, negation is a major source of poor precision in medical information retrieval systems. Previous research has shown that negated findings may be difficult to identify if the words implying negations (negation signals) are more than a few words away from them. We present a new pattern learning method for automatic identification of negative context in clinical narratives reports. We compare the new algorithm to previous methods proposed for the same task, and show its advantages: accuracy improvement compared to other machine learning methods, and much faster than manual knowledge engineering techniques with matching accuracy. The new algorithm can be applied also to further context identification and information extraction tasks.

An analysis on document length retrieval trends in language modeling smoothing

Document length is widely recognized as an important factor for adjusting retrieval systems. Many models tend to favor the retrieval of either short or long documents and, thus, a length-based correction needs to be applied for avoiding any length bias. In Language Modeling for Information Retrieval, smoothing methods are applied to move probability mass from document terms to unseen words, which is often dependant upon document length. In this article, we perform an in-depth study of this behavior, characterized by the document length retrieval trends, of three popular smoothing methods across a number of factors, and its impact on the length of documents retrieved and retrieval performance. First, we theoretically analyze the Jelinek–Mercer, Dirichlet prior and two-stage smoothing strategies and, then, conduct an empirical analysis. In our analysis we show how Dirichlet prior smoothing caters for document length more appropriately than Jelinek–Mercer smoothing which leads to its superior retrieval performance. In a follow up analysis, we posit that length-based priors can be used to offset any bias in the length retrieval trends stemming from the retrieval formula derived by the smoothing technique. We show that the performance of Jelinek–Mercer smoothing can be significantly improved by using such a prior, which provides a natural and simple alternative to decouple the query and document modeling roles of smoothing. With the analysis of retrieval behavior conducted in this article, it is possible to understand why the Dirichlet Prior smoothing performs better than the Jelinek–Mercer, and why the performance of the Jelinek–Mercer method is improved by including a length-based prior.

Discoverability and Access in Book Publishing

Search engine discoverability programs have changed the fundamentals of book marketing by enabling content inside the book to be used as the source of marketing itself via search results inside books. The internet trifecta of search, browse, buy is the end game but the complexities of making this work is explored along with an in-depth overview of the potential upside and difficulties of online content purchase models.     

Experimentation and Innovation in U.S. Publishing Today: Findings from the Book Industry Study Group

In February 2008 the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) conducted a survey of U.S. publishers to determine the extent of technology-driven innovation and experimentation. The survey findings were published alongside a set of 10 case studies in May 2008 as “From experimentation to innovation in the digital age—case studies from the North American Book Industry 2008”. This article, written by Michael Healy, Executive Director of the BISG, summarizes the circumstances that led to the survey and shares the key findings.     

Archival Science in Brazil: the establishment of a scientific discipline and its impact on training archivists in the era of information and knowledge

This article addresses the trajectory of Archival Science in Brazil, its extracurricular characteristics and its particular relationship with Information Science within academics, its institutional associations, and some considerations regarding current training for archivists in Brazil. The methodological procedures used included analyzing documents from the National Archive Fonds of Brazil, reviewing archive literature, and interviewing people involved in consolidating Archival Science. This study concludes that Archival Science research is taking place in graduate programs throughout public Brazilian universities and points out that people working with archives now have more advanced training, such as undergraduate degrees in Archival Science or other. This study also focuses on archives as information units, while presenting and reflecting on the demands of training archivists who are faced with the challenges of the working world and the era of information and knowledge—challenges that go beyond merely technical procedures and encompass dynamic planning and orientation activities.