A microfluidic cell for studying the formation of regenerated silk by synchrotron radiation small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering

A tube-in-square-pipe microfluidic glass cell has been developed for studying the aggregation and fiber formation from regenerated silk solution by in-situ small-angle X-ray scattering using synchrotron radiation. Acidification-induced aggregation has been observed close to the mixing point of the fibroin and buffer solution. The fibrous, amorphous material is collected in a water bath. Micro-wide-angle X-ray scattering of the dried material confirms its β-sheet nature.     

Was Kennzeichnet hermeneutische Forschung?

Zun?chst wird über die INterpretation eines antiken Reliefs, der so genannten „sinnenden Athena“, ein Zugang zur Bildungskonfiguration in der klassischen griechischen Antike gesucht. An diesem Beispiel einer historischen Rekonstruktion werden dann fünf Merkmale herausgearbeitet, die hermeneutische Forschung in der P?dagogik kennzeichnen: 1. szientistische Verfahren, 2. Kulturanalysen, 3. ein Methodenverst7;andnis des Anteilnehmens am Forschungsgegenstand, 4. Vertrautsein mit dem Forschungsfeld und 5. Ideologiekrritik.     

Autonomism: A defence of structural privilege?

Christian Bay will respond to the interchanges by Jan Narveson and Larry Haworth (see pp. 60–75 of this issue) in a forthcoming issue ofInterchange.     

Output-sensitive autocompletion search

We consider the following autocompletion search scenario: imagine a user of a search engine typing a query; then with every keystroke display those completions of the last query word that would lead to the best hits, and also display the best such hits. The following problem is at the core of this feature: for a fixed document collection, given a set D of documents, and an alphabetical range W of words, compute the set of all word-in-document pairs (w, d) from the collection such that w ∈ W and d ∈ D. We present a new data structure with the help of which such autocompletion queries can be processed, on the average, in time linear in the input plus output size, independent of the size of the underlying document collection. At the same time, our data structure uses no more space than an inverted index. Actual query processing times on a large test collection correlate almost perfectly with our theoretical bound.

On Kristjánsson on Aristotelian character education

I pursue three of the many lines of thought that were raised in my mind by Kristjánsson’s engaging book. In the first section, I try to get clearer on what exactly Aristotelian character education (ACE) is, and suggest areas where I hope the view is developed in more detail. In the second and longest section, I draw some lessons from social psychology about the pervasive role of what I call ‘Surprising Dispositions,’ and invite Kristjánsson to take up the difficult challenge of clarifying how ACE would help to address their influence on our thought and action. Finally, in section three I consider whether there is any robust empirical support for ACE, and if not, where that leaves us.     

Relevance feedback and cross-language information retrieval

This paper presents a study of relevance feedback in a cross-language information retrieval environment. We have performed an experiment in which Portuguese speakers are asked to judge the relevance of English documents; documents hand-translated to Portuguese and documents automatically translated to Portuguese. The goals of the experiment were to answer two questions (i) how well can native Portuguese searchers recognise relevant documents written in English, compared to documents that are hand translated and automatically translated to Portuguese; and (ii) what is the impact of misjudged documents on the performance improvement that can be achieved by relevance feedback. Surprisingly, the results show that machine translation is as effective as hand translation in aiding users to assess relevance in the experiment. In addition, the impact of misjudged documents on the performance of RF is overall just moderate, and varies greatly for different query topics.     

User-innovators and “local” information: The case of mountain biking

In a study of innovations developed by mountain bikers, we find that user-innovators almost always utilize “local” information - information already in their possession or generated by themselves - both to determine the need for and to develop the solutions for their innovations. We argue that this finding fits the economic incentives operating on users. Local need information will in general be the most relevant to user-innovators, since the bulk of their innovation-related rewards typically come from in-house use. User-innovators will increasingly tend to rely on local solution information as the stickiness of non-local solution information rises. When user-innovators do rely on local information, it may be possible to predict the general nature of the innovations they might develop.