‘I came like the thunder and I vanish like the wind’: exploring genre repertoire and document work in the Assemblea operai e studenti of 1969

This paper will examine a suite of documents generated within one Italian post-war social movement as a means to explore four assertions: (a) that the common practice of addressing the printed word generated by social movements primarily as bearers of linguistic and conceptual content (‘texts’) too often comes at the price of ignoring certain fundamental matters of which the materiality of these documents can inform us; (b) that, connected to this, the lenses of genre and genre repertoire offer important means of deepening our readings not only of the content of social movement documents, but also the broader context of their production and use; (c) used with care, understandings of genre, genre repertoire and the materiality of documents can likewise inform the efforts of those working—in the community, in the history and heritage professions, and at the intersection of all three—to preserve and manage such documents; (d) reflections upon genre, genre repertoire and the materiality of documents may also contribute to the ongoing development of a critical information studies.     

Precision prediction based on ranked list coherence

We introduce a statistical measure of the coherence of a list of documents called the clarity score. Starting with a document list ranked by the query-likelihood retrieval model, we demonstrate the score's relationship to query ambiguity with respect to the collection. We also show that the clarity score is correlated with the average precision of a query and lay the groundwork for useful predictions by discussing a method of setting decision thresholds automatically. We then show that passage-based clarity scores correlate with average-precision measures of ranked lists of passages, where a passage is judged relevant if it contains correct answer text, which extends the basic method to passage-based systems. Next, we introduce variants of document-based clarity scores to improve the robustness, applicability, and predictive ability of clarity scores. In particular, we introduce the ranked list clarity score that can be computed with only a ranked list of documents, and the weighted clarity score where query terms contribute more than other terms. Finally, we show an approach to predicting queries that perform poorly on query expansion that uses techniques expanding on the ideas presented earlier.

Reflections on the British Government and Higher Education

This article offers a small contribution towards writing the history of higher education in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Its emphasis is on what the Government did in that period and the effects of this, and on how relations stood and developed between the Government and the higher education community. Three main topics are identified: resourcing, quality, structure. Across all these the general message is that a pragmatic approach was taken to the evolution and pursuit of policy.     

Classroom studies into cognitive style in mathematics for pupils with dyslexia in special education in the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK

The project reported here was designed to explore the cognitive style used by pupils with dyslexia when answering a range of mathematical questions. The research involved 132 pupils aged between 9 and 13 years, including 66 pupils in mainstream and 66 pupils in specialist schools, in three countries in Europe.
Detailed studies of the methods used by pupils attempting the given questions on a test of cognitive style suggested that they fell into two main categories. These pupils were observed when completing the test and their responses were categorised accordingly. The resulting numerical data were then analysed for differences between pupils within each country and between their non-dyslexic counterparts.
The results showed significant differences in the balance of cognitive styles employed by pupils with dyslexia as opposed to their non-dyslexic counterparts. Also there were interesting differences occurring between the pupils with dyslexia within the three countries on initial testing. Further differences were established after a six-month intervention period, suggesting that the characteristics of different curriculum models do have an impact upon pupils' flexibility as learners.