Supercomplexity and the university: Ronald Barnett and the social philosophy of Higher Education

Ronald Barnett's modern classic Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity (published December 1999), has had a crucial impact internationally on the field of Higher Education research and development since the book was published now nearly 20 years ago. Bridging an academic oeuvre across almost 30 years with close to 30 published volumes, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity plays an important role in the development and transformation of Barnett's social theory of Higher Education into a social philosophy of Higher Education. In the book Barnett performs an important move from a focus on knowledge and epistemology to a focus on being and ontology in relation to Higher Education practices. Barnett shifts his fundamental perspective and view on the relation between universities and the wider society from one of caution and worry to a perspective of hope and vision that fully embraces the future of Higher Education. This way, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity has not only paved the way for Barnett's own development of a social philosophy of Higher Education, but also contributed invaluably to the rise and maturing of philosophy of Higher Education as a research field in its own right.     

Recording the war effort: immigrant communities in Latin America and the memory of the Great War

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to analyse the initiatives undertaken by some immigrant communities residing in Latin America to record their mobilisation around the First World War. After the armistice, European communities in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and other countries gathered detailed information about their activities during the conflict, published as profusely illustrated books of remembrance, offered to their governments as proof of their loyalty. The article intends to establish the peculiar nature of these publications as records of the war effort, and analyse the agents and processes of their elaboration, and their role as commemorative but also as archival documents.     

REAL: Ein ressourcenadaptierendes mobiles Navigationssystem

Zusammenfassung.   Die intelligente Ressourcenadaption ist eine der gro?en Herausforderungen für die n?chste Generation mobiler Navigationssysteme. Da man typischerweise mehrere Fortbewegungsarten oder Verkehrsmittel kombinieren muss, um an einen Zielort zu gelangen, muss sichergestellt werden, dass mobile, allgegenw?rtige Navigationshilfen dies über eine jeweils situationsangepasste Benutzerschnittstelle unterstützen. Der notwendige Wechsel zwischen verschiedenen Positionierungstechnologien soll für den Endbenutzer m?glichst unbemerkt bleiben. Im folgenden wird ein hybrides Personennavigationssystem vorgestellt, das die in bestimmten Fortbewegungssituationen verfügbaren Positionierungstechnologien und deren Genauigkeit optimal nutzt, um die Pr?sentation der Wegbeschreibung auf verschiedene Endger?te und Ausgabemodalit?ten sowie die kognitive Ressourcenlage des Benutzers zu adaptieren. Eingegangen am 28. Februar 2001 / Angenommen am 8. August 2001     

Retrieving and classifying instances of source code plagiarism

Automatic detection of source code plagiarism is an important research field for both the commercial software industry and within the research community. Existing methods of plagiarism detection primarily involve exhaustive pairwise document comparison, which does not scale well for large software collections. To achieve scalability, we approach the problem from an information retrieval (IR) perspective. We retrieve a ranked list of candidate documents in response to a pseudo-query representation constructed from each source code document in the collection. The challenge in source code document retrieval is that the standard bag-of-words (BoW) representation model for such documents is likely to result in many false positives being retrieved, because of the use of identical programming language specific constructs and keywords. To address this problem, we make use of an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the source code documents. While the IR approach is efficient, it is essentially unsupervised in nature. To further improve its effectiveness, we apply a supervised classifier (pre-trained with features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs) on the top ranked retrieved documents. We report experiments on the SOCO-2014 dataset comprising 12K Java source files with almost 1M lines of code. Our experiments confirm that the AST based approach produces significantly better retrieval effectiveness than a standard BoW representation, i.e., the AST based approach is able to identify a higher number of plagiarized source code documents at top ranks in response to a query source code document. The supervised classifier, trained on features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs, is shown to effectively filter and thus further improve the ranked list of retrieved candidate plagiarized documents.     

Health science libraries in Sweden: new directions,expanding roles

Librarians in Sweden are facing huge challenges in meeting the demands of their organisations and users. This article looks at four key areas: coping with open science/open access initiatives; increasing demands from researchers for support doing systematic reviews; understanding user experiences in Swedish health science libraries; and the consequences of expanding roles for recruitment and continuing professional development. With regard to changing roles, there is an increasing shift from the generalist towards the expert role. The authors raise the issue as to how to prepare those new to the profession to the changing environment of health science libraries.     

Granularity of algorithmically constructed publication-level classifications of research publications: Identification of topics

The purpose of this study is to find a theoretically grounded, practically applicable and useful granularity level of an algorithmically constructed publication-level classification of research publications (ACPLC). The level addressed is the level of research topics. The methodology we propose uses synthesis papers and their reference articles to construct a baseline classification. A dataset of about 31 million publications, and their mutual citations relations, is used to obtain several ACPLCs of different granularity. Each ACPLC is compared to the baseline classification and the best performing ACPLC is identified. The results of two case studies show that the topics of the cases are closely associated with different classes of the identified ACPLC, and that these classes tend to treat only one topic. Further, the class size variation is moderate, and only a small proportion of the publications belong to very small classes. For these reasons, we conclude that the proposed methodology is suitable to determine the topic granularity level of an ACPLC and that the ACPLC identified by this methodology is useful for bibliometric analyses.     

Investigating the quality of interactions and public engagement around scientific papers on Twitter

This study explores science communication on Twitter by investigating a sample of tweets referring to academic papers in five different scientific fields. The specifications of science communicators on Twitter, the characteristics of those who initiate actions (by tweeting), the extent and quality of reactions (retweeting), individual and group interactions, and the distribution of tweets across types of engagement in the process of science communication (i.e., dissemination, consultation, and evaluation) were explored. A broad array of actors is involved in the communication of science on Twitter, with individual citizens and individual researchers playing an important role. In principle, this is promising for creating direct interaction, which can be difficult through more traditional mass media. The vast majority of communication activities regarding academic papers is undigested dissemination with almost no sign of debate, contestation, or collective reflection. Another general finding of this study is that bot accounts play a major role in the science communication landscape on Twitter.