Drawing Subway Maps: A?Survey

This paper deals with automating the drawing of subway maps. There are two features of schematic subway maps that make them different from drawings of other networks such as flow charts or organigrams. First, most schematic subway maps use not only horizontal and vertical lines, but also diagonals. This gives more flexibility in the layout process, but it also makes the problem provably hard. Second, a subway map represents a network whose components have geographic locations that are roughly known to the users of such a map. This knowledge must be respected during the search for a clear layout of the network. For the sake of visual clarity the underlying geography may be distorted, but it must not be given up, otherwise map users will be hopelessly confused. In this paper we first give a rather generally accepted list of rules that should be adhered to by a good subway map. Next we survey three recent methods for drawing subway maps, analyze their performance with respect to the above rules, and compare the resulting maps among each other and to official subway maps drawn by graphic designers. We then focus on one of the methods, which is based on mixed-integer linear programming, a widely-used global optimization technique. This method guarantees to find a drawing that fulfills a subset of the above-mentioned rules (if such a drawing exists) and optimizes a weighted sum of costs that correspond to the remaining rules. The method can draw even large subway networks such as the London Underground in an aesthetically pleasing manner, similar to maps made by professional graphic designers. If station labels are included in the optimization process, so far only medium-size networks can be drawn. Finally we give evidence why drawing good subway maps is difficult (even without labels).     

Organisational rules, codification and knowledge creation in inter-organisation cooperative agreements

The aim of our paper is to analyse the process of collaboration between independent firms linked by a technological agreement in the energy field, with a specific focus on the degree of codification of inter-organisational rules. Considering the agreement as a collection of different types of more or less codified rules, we show that their degree of codification and some other characteristics have an impact on the process of inter-firm cooperation.The paper first provides an analytical framework defining the concept and the types of rules relevant for our purpose. A rule is conceived to solve a problem of allocation or creation of resources; it serves a main function which can be of a cognitive, incentive or coordination nature; it is ambivalent, i.e. it entails side functions in addition to the main one. Two theoretical propositions are then developed and largely confirmed by our empirical research results based on two detailed case studies in the emerging field of fuel cell (FC) technology.     

A study of laughter in science lessons

Laughter is a fundamental human phenomenon. Yet there is little educational research on the potential functions of laughter on the enacted (lived) curriculum. In this study, we identify the functions of laughter in a beginning science teacher's classroom throughout her first year of teaching. Our study shows that laughter is more than a gratuitous phenomenon. It is the result of a collective interactive achievement of the classroom participants that offsets the seriousness of science as a discipline. Laughter, whereas it challenges the seriousness of science, also includes the dialectical inversion of the challenge: it simultaneously reinforces the idea of science as serious business. Furthermore, levels of intimacy, complicity, and solidarity between the teacher and her students were reproduced and transformed through their laughter in class. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 437–458, 2011     

Fear of Failure and the Pass-Fail Grading Option

The Pass-Fail (P-F) option presents (a) a natural setting for testing some implications of Atkinson’s concept of “fear of failure” (1, 2) and (b) a practical setting for evaluating one aspect of university policy. A sample of students enrolled for P-F credit was compared (on test anxiety, grade utilities under chance and skill conditions, grades, and course loads) with another sample taking course work under an A-F grading system. Only partial confirmation was found for a prediction that test anxiety should be negatively correlated with the difference between grade utilities under chance and under skill conditions. Other findings were (a) that test anxiety and grade option were not significantly correlated, and (b) that the P-F sample had significantly higher grades and heavier course loads.     

Students’ Representations of Scientific Practice during a Science Internship: Reflections from an activity‐theoretic perspective

Working at scientists’ elbows is one suggestion that educators make to improve science education, because such “authentic experiences” provide students with various types of science knowledge. However, there is an ongoing debate in the literature about the assumption that authentic science activities can enhance students’ understandings of scientific practice. The purpose of the study is to further address the debate in terms of the ethnographic data collected during an internship programme for high school students right through to their public presentations at the end. Drawing on activity theory to analyse these presentations, we found that students presented scientific practice as accomplished by individual personnel without collaboration in the laboratory. However, our ethnographic data of their internship interaction show that students have had conversations about the complex collaborations within and outside the laboratory. This phenomenon leads us to claim that students experienced authentic science in their internships, but their subsequent representations of authentic science are incomplete. That is, participating in authentic science internships and reporting scientific practice are embedded activities that constitute different goals and conditions rather than unrefracted reflections of one another. The debate on the influence on students’ understanding of science practice is not simply related to situating students in authentic science contexts, but also related to students’ values and ideology of reporting their understanding of and about science. To help students see these “invisible” moments of science practice is therefore crucial. We make suggestions for how the invisible in and of authentic science may be made visible.     

Learning music similarity from relative user ratings

Computational modelling of music similarity is an increasingly important part of personalisation and optimisation in music information retrieval and research in music perception and cognition. The use of relative similarity ratings is a new and promising approach to modelling similarity that avoids well known problems with absolute ratings. In this article, we use relative ratings from the MagnaTagATune dataset with new and existing variants of state-of-the-art algorithms and provide the first comprehensive and rigorous evaluation of this approach. We compare metric learning based on support vector machines (SVMs) and metric-learning-to-rank (MLR), including a diagonal and a novel weighted variant, and relative distance learning with neural networks (RDNN). We further evaluate the effectiveness of different high and low level audio features and genre data, as well as dimensionality reduction methods, weighting of similarity ratings, and different sampling methods. Our results show that music similarity measures learnt on relative ratings can be significantly better than a standard Euclidian metric, depending on the choice of learning algorithm, feature sets and application scenario. MLR and SVM outperform DMLR and RDNN, while MLR with weighted ratings leads to no further performance gain. Timbral and music-structural features are most effective, and all features jointly are significantly better than any other combination of feature sets. Sharing audio clips (but not the similarity ratings) between test and training sets improves performance, in particular for the SVM-based methods, which is useful for some applications scenarios. A testing framework has been implemented in Matlab and made publicly available http://mi.soi.city.ac.uk/datasets/ir2012framework so that these results are reproducible.     

EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL SERVICE

Employing humanities religious studies resources, a special curriculum was designed to complement established social science offerings in advocating better understanding and acceptance of persons suffering from long‐term mental disorders. A private denominational university formed the background, and the professor's family consumer viewpoint further shaped the syllabus.

The educational vision sought first to expose misinformation and describe recent brain research indicating a biological cause for serious mental illness; next, cultural stigma was studied in reference to selected literary and sacred texts.

Titles of other appropriate readings—as well as audio‐visual resources—are provided. Positive and negative student response to the course as a whole suggest the value of an envisioned advocacy, as did post‐classroom learner activities in both the 1991 class and its 1992 repeat.

The instructor lists recommendations for those who may wish to venture similar efforts in the subject.