Coming of Age? Overview of Career Guidance Policy and Practice in Australia

In recent years significant international focus has highlighted the critical importance of managing life, learning and work in a constantly changing labour market. This changing world and the corresponding need for individuals to engage in repeated decision-making about learning and work has raised the importance of and necessity for the provision of career development services across the lifespan. This challenge is being addressed by many countries across the globe. Within this context, this paper discusses the initiatives enhancing the status of career service provision in Australia.     

Research Policy In Emerging Economies: Brazil’s Sector Funds

This paper examines Brazil’s Sector Funds, an emerging research and development policy that seeks to increase public-private research collaboration. The first section sets the context of the ‘policy problem’. The second section discusses the policy’s implementation, and discusses its likely implications for Brazil and beyond.     

Science on the Periphery. The spanish Reception of Nuclear Energy: an Attempt at Modernity?

During the Cold War, Franco’s dictatorship attempted to use technological transfer and nuclear technology to strengthen the geopolitical influence of his Government in Spain. This paper studies this process, with particular reference to the role played by German scientists as advisers to the Spanish nuclear project.     

The Market for Picasso Prints: A Hybrid Model Approach

Two basic approaches have been used by the literature focusing on the return to holding artistic works: the hedonic price model and the repeat-sales model. This paper provides a procedure for jointly estimating the two models in a way that take advantages of the unique information contained in each. A semiannual price index for Picasso prints is estimated by using a model derived from the basic framework of the hybrid models. The empirical results suggest that the hybrid model provides the most precisely estimated price index by reducing the level of price volatility.JEL Classification: C5, Z1p     

Mobile Agents for Distributed and Heterogeneous Information Retrieval

The heterogeneous, distributed and voluminous nature of many government and corporate data sources impose severe constraints on meeting the diverse requirements of users who analyze the data. Additionally, communication bandwidth limitations, time constraints, and multiple data formats impose further restrictions on users of these distributed data sources. In this paper, we present an Agent-based Complex QUerying and Information Retrieval Engine (ACQUIRE) for large, heterogeneous, and distributed data sources. ACQUIRE acts as a softbot or interface agent by presenting users with a view of a single, unified, homogenous data source, against which users can pose high-level declarative queries. ACQUIRE translates each such user query into a set of sub-queries by employing a combination of planning and traditional database query optimization techniques. ACQUIRE then spawns a set of mobile agents corresponding to these sub-queries, which in turn retrieve the data from various distributed data sources by dynamically optimizing the retrieval strategy as it is carried out. These mobile agents carry with them data-processing code that can be executed at the remote site, thus reducing the size of data returned by the agent. When all mobile agents have returned, ACQUIRE filters and merges the retrieved data and presents the results to the user. While the system is still very much a work in progress, current validation experiments on simulated NASA Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) have demonstrated that complex queries can be effectively decomposed and retrieved by this approach.     

Introduction to the Special Issue on INEX

This special issue contains articles describing XML retrieval approaches developed and evaluated during the second year of INEX, the evaluation initiative for XML retrieval.     

Hybrid XML Retrieval: Combining Information Retrieval and a Native XML Database

This paper investigates the impact of three approaches to XML retrieval: using Zettair, a full-text information retrieval system; using eXist, a native XML database; and using a hybrid system that takes full article answers from Zettair and uses eXist to extract elements from those articles. For the content-only topics, we undertake a preliminary analysis of the INEX 2003 relevance assessments in order to identify the types of highly relevant document components. Further analysis identifies two complementary sub-cases of relevance assessments (General and Specific) and two categories of topics (Broad and Narrow). We develop a novel retrieval module that for a content-only topic utilises the information from the resulting answer list of a native XML database and dynamically determines the preferable units of retrieval, which we call Coherent Retrieval Elements. The results of our experiments show that—when each of the three systems is evaluated against different retrieval scenarios (such as different cases of relevance assessments, different topic categories and different choices of evaluation metrics)—the XML retrieval systems exhibit varying behaviour and the best performance can be reached for different values of the retrieval parameters. In the case of INEX 2003 relevance assessments for the content-only topics, our newly developed hybrid XML retrieval system is substantially more effective than either Zettair or eXist, and yields a robust and a very effective XML retrieval.