How can FIFA be held accountable?

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA, is a non-governmental organization located in Switzerland that is responsible for overseeing the quadrennial World Cup football (soccer) competition in addition to its jurisdiction over other various international competitions and aspects of international football. The organization, long accused of corruption, has in recent years been increasingly criticized by observers and stakeholders for its lack of transparency and accountability. In 2011 FIFA initiated a governance reform process which will come to a close in May 2013. This paper draws on literature in the field of international relations to ask and answer the question: how can FIFA be held accountable? The paper's review finds that the answer to this question is “not easily.” The experience in reforming the International Olympic Committee (IOC) more than a decade ago provides one model for how reform might occur in FIFA. However, any effective reform will require the successful and simultaneous application of multiple mechanisms of accountability. The FIFA case study has broader implications for understanding mechanisms of accountability more generally, especially as related to international non-governmental organizations.     

Evaluating multimodal relevance feedback techniques for medical image retrieval

Medical image retrieval can assist physicians in finding information supporting their diagnosis and fulfilling information needs. Systems that allow searching for medical images need to provide tools for quick and easy navigation and query refinement as the time available for information search is often short. Relevance feedback is a powerful tool in information retrieval. This study evaluates relevance feedback techniques with regard to the content they use. A novel relevance feedback technique that uses both text and visual information of the results is proposed. The two information modalities from the image examples are fused either at the feature level using the Rocchio algorithm or at the query list fusion step using a common late fusion rule. Results using the ImageCLEF 2012 benchmark database for medical image retrieval show the potential of relevance feedback techniques in medical image retrieval. The mean average precision (mAP) is used as the evaluation metric and the proposed method outperforms commonly-used methods. The baseline without feedback reached 16 % whereas the relevance feedback with 20 images reached up to 26.35 % with three steps and when using 100 images up to 34.87 % in four steps. Most improvements occur in the first two steps of relevance feedback and then results start to become relatively flat. This might also be due to only using positive feedback as negative feeback often also improves results after more steps. The effect of relevance feedback in automatically spelling corrected and translated queries is investigated as well. Results without mistakes were better than spell-corrected results but the spelling correction more than double results over non-corrected retrieval. Multimodal relevance feedback has shown to be able to help visual medical information retrieval. Next steps include integrating semantics into relevance feedback techniques to benefit from the structured knowledge of ontologies and experimenting on the fusion of text and visual information.     

Engagement of Academic Libraries and Information Science Schools in Creating Curriculum for Sustainability: An Exploratory Study

In 2010, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education released, “Sustainability curriculum in higher education: A call to action,” encouraging infusion of sustainability topics into universities' teaching and research. Since then, academic programs and research related to social, economic, and environmental sustainability have enriched university curricula. An exploratory study was conducted to determine the position and engagements of academic libraries and information science schools in their contributions to scholarly sustainability activities and curricular initiatives. This article presents the results of the study which reveals a number of engagements by library professionals in the areas of sustainability, such as increasing open access to research, building sustainability-related collections and research guides, and incorporating sustainability content into information literacy. While academic libraries and information science schools are engaged in a broad spectrum of initiatives that support their institutions' sustainability research and curricular functions, this study indicates that such activities require a more targeted approach.     

Central Government Agencies and the Management of Vocational Educational and Training

The article considers current proposals for the contribution of central government departments towards the effective management of vocational education and training in The United Kingdom. Starting from some broad assumptions about the objectives of vocational education and training, an attempt is made to place discussions about what roles the Department of Education and Science and the Department of Employment/Manpower Services Commission should play in this field within the context of events that have occurred over the past forty years. Three alternative forms of management relationships are considered, two of which recommend the formation of a new department, either a Department of Education and Training or a Department of Employment and Vocational Training, while the third supports a refinement of present ad hoc inter‐departmental arrangements. After examining the perceived advantages and disadvantages of these proposals, it is suggested that a new central government management system is required in order to provide a more systematic response. The article concludes with the suggestions that such a system might have consequences for institutional change, individual freedom of choice and the improvement of opportunities for disadvantaged groups different from those that are usually predicted.