Who Will Censor? BC Tel and the Oliver “Hate” Web-Site

The Internet has been described by many critics as providing a friendly home for racist web-sites, whose number has been steadily growing. Many of these sites display vicious anti-Semitic, anti-black, and anti-gay propaganda. However much they disgust most people, in the US they are protected by the First Amendment. Canada, by contrast, has hate discrimination provisions in its Criminal Code. Canadians seem to be much more willing than Americans to abridge freedom of expression when the speech is hateful. Various European countries take a stronger stand than Canada in their determination to combat racism. In this talk, I will explore the Canadian position in the context of the case of Oliver, BC. It was the location of an Internet Service Provider (ISP), Fairview Technology Centre, accused of hosting a number of hate sites. Attempts to deal with this accusation constitute the central part of the paper.     

Evaluating Content-Related Validity Evidence Using a Text-Based Machine Learning Procedure

Validity evidence based on test content is critical to meaningful interpretation of test scores. Within high-stakes testing and accountability frameworks, content-related validity evidence is typically gathered via alignment studies, with panels of experts providing qualitative judgments on the degree to which test items align with the representative content standards. Various summary statistics are then calculated (e.g., categorical concurrence, balance of representation) to aid in decision-making. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach for gathering content-related validity evidence that capitalizes on the overlap in vocabulary used in test items and the corresponding content standards, which we define as textual congruence. We use a text-based, machine learning model, specifically topic modeling, to identify clusters of related content within the standards. This model then serves as the basis from which items are evaluated. We illustrate our method by building a model from the Next Generation Science Standards, with textual congruence evaluated against items within the Oregon statewide alternate assessment. We discuss the utility of this approach as a source of triangulating and diagnostic information and show how visualizations can be used to evaluate the overall coverage of the content standards across the test items.     

African Journals Online: improving awareness and access

Indigenous journal publication is vital to the well-being of the African research enterprise in ways that the high-profile initiatives of Western publishers have, so far, failed to address. This paper describes the scope and development of African Journals Online, a free service which provides online access to the tables of contents and abstracts of scholarly journals published in Africa, backed by a document delivery service and managed by the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications.     

An organization of classical particle mechanics

Certain techniques, concepts and methods used to model and analyze the motion of massive bodies under forces are not admissible under the Newtonian axioms. Among them are: forces acting on massles components rather than on particles, using the so-called free-body diagram technique, and the existence of infinite forces of bounded impulse. Moreover, modeling physical space by Euclidean 3-space introduces some basic difficulties which are usually silently ignored. We propose here an organization of classical particle mechanics which provides the additional axioms and defined terms needed to legitimize the mathematical models and methods presently used in the analysis of Newtonian systems.