Mapping out the research field of adult education and learning

International Review of Education -     

An open invitation to join HILJ [Journal] Club

Journal clubs are an effective means to increase skills in handling evidence and support the continuing professional development of library and knowledge services workers. This editorial examines the progression of HILJ Club, an online journal club, from an idea to the launch of a dedicated platform. One article is selected per issue of the Health Information and Libraries Journal with an open discussion invited following a brief summary and reflections by a host. Participation in HILJ Club is growing. Future success is reliant on wider engagement, and an invitation is extended to join in the discussions or even host an edition.     

Correcting human error in alphanumeric terminal input

An automatic method for correcting spelling and typing errors from teletypewriter keyboard input is proposed. The computerized correcting process is presented as a heuristic tree search. The correct spellings are stored character-by-character in a psuedo-binary tree. The search examines a small subset of the database (selected branches of the tree) while checking for insertion, substitution, deletion and transposition errors. The correction procedure utilizes the inherent redundancy of natural language. Multiple errors can be handled if at least two correct characters appear between errors. Test results indicate that this approach has the highest error correction accuracy to date.     

Strategic motivators and expected benefits from e-commerce in traditional organisations

This paper aims to identify the strategic motivators and expected benefits related to the implementation of e-commerce infrastructures in traditional “brick and mortar” organisations. Despite the fact that the clearest benefit from e-commerce might be expected to come from contribution to corporate profits, either from an increase of sales or reduction of costs, but this may not be the case. The literature suggests that there are different ways in which the potential benefits can be assessed. These ways are directly related to the evolution of e-commerce. This research has chosen six representative organisations from different sectors to explore their rationales for their e-commerce strategies. One of the main benefits reported is to increase the focus on the customer and improving internal communications. Additionally, obtaining competitive advantage was found to be a powerful motivator, despite the fact that the recent academic literature suggests that this is very difficult to achieve.     

诺贝尔奖得主寄语中国未来的科学发展

5月25—26日,在纪念国家自然科学基金委员会成立20周年的“21世纪科学前沿与中国的机遇”高层论坛上,6位诺贝尔奖得主做了精彩报告。在对中国科学的未来发展寄予殷切期望的同时,他们也对中国的科技政策提出了具有启发性的建议。现摘编如下:诺贝尔化学奖得主、美国耶鲁大学教授S     

A Story‐based Simulation for Teaching Sampling Distributions

Statistical inference relies heavily on the concept of sampling distributions. However, sampling distributions are difficult to teach. We present a series of short animations that are story‐based, with associated assessments. We hope that our contribution can be useful as a tool to teach sampling distributions in the introductory statistics classroom.     

A usage study of retrieval modalities for video shot retrieval

As an information medium, video offers many possible retrieval and browsing modalities, far more than text, image or audio. Some of these, like searching the text of the spoken dialogue, are well developed, others like keyframe browsing tools are in their infancy, and others not yet technically achievable. For those modalities for browsing and retrieval which we cannot yet achieve we can only speculate as to how useful they will actually be, but we do not know for sure. In our work we have created a system to support multiple modalities for video browsing and retrieval including text search through the spoken dialogue, image matching against shot keyframes and object matching against segmented video objects. For the last of these, automatic segmentation and tracking of video objects is a computationally demanding problem which is not yet solved for generic natural video material, and when it is then it is expected to open up possibilities for user interaction with objects in video, including searching and browsing. In this paper we achieve object segmentation by working in a closed domain of animated cartoons. We describe an interactive user experiment on a medium-sized corpus of video where we were able to measure users’ use of video objects versus other modes of retrieval during multiple-iteration searching. Results of this experiment show that although object searching is used far less than text searching in the first iteration of a user’s search it is a popular and useful search type once an initial set of relevant shots have been found.     

Factors Affecting the Use of MIS as a Tool for Informing and Evaluating Teaching and Learning in Schools

This study looks at the way in which Management Information Systems (MISs) are being used in Primary Schools in Birmingham. Analysis was from data collected through a questionnaire, to a 50% sample of schools in May 1999 and semi structured interviews with a cross section of staff at 20 schools, conducted during the period September 1999 until September 2001. The findings indicate that despite an overwhelming acceptance of the value of such systems, they are generally being used to provide specific statutory returns and administrative type functions. This is as opposed to use as a constant monitoring tool for self-evaluation, performance management, alerting and feedback, which is then used to inform the teaching and learning process. The paper goes on to propose a hypothesis as to why this is occurring and makes suggestions as to how the situation may be remedied. The research and its findings are part of the LEAs continuous evaluation of the use of ICT in its schools and the remedies which follow are part of its planning for the future.     

Associative aspects of conditioned analgesia evoked by a discrete CS

Learning & Behavior - Four experiments with rat subjects assessed conditioned analgesia evoked by a discrete visual CS repeatedly paired with a shock US. In Experiment 1, rats that received...