Public Attitudes toward Polls: Evidence from the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

This study investigates the perceived impact of election polls,focusing on the hotly contested 2000 U.S. presidential election.Survey data from 558 individuals gathered during the final daysof the election campaign are analyzed to examine beliefs thatthe polls greatly affect other voters, general views of pollsas good or bad for the country, beliefs about whether pollstersinfluence their results to come out a certain way, and supportfor banning election-night projections. Results indicate thatmost respondents felt the polls had no influence on themselveswhile still affecting others. Respondents exhibiting these ‘third-person-effect’perceptions were significantly more likely than others to believethat election polls are a bad thing for the country. Negativeperceptions of polls and beliefs that pollsters try to influenceresults were also related to general distrust of the news media.Negative views of polls in turn were associated with increasedsupport for prohibiting election-night projections. In general,the results illustrate the dependency of negative views aboutpolling on fears of untoward effects on voters, in particularthe fear that polls and election projections might lend supportto candidates opposed by the respondent.     

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.     

The debate over the National Curriculum for history in England and Wales, 198990: the role of the press

The construction of a history curriculum for England and for Wales under the terms of the 1988 Education Reform Act occasioned more debate in the media than any other subject in the National Curriculum. The links between the content of a history syllabus and perceptions within both nations of the part this plays in moulding national spirit made this inevitable. The disparity of view between the two groups charged with devising the syllabus and the government, particularly the Prime Minister, heightened the tension. This article explores the way in which consequent political, professional and public discussion was covered in the whole range of national newspapers. It is argued that the failure of the London press to comprehend the situation in Wales reduced significantly its appreciation of the processes involved in the making of the history curriculum.     

Perceived Message Effectiveness Predicts Information-Seeking Behavior

This study examined whether perceived message effectiveness (PE) predicted information-seeking behavior in the topical domain of colon cancer. Participants (N = 277) viewed one of three video messages (news, testimonial, and animation) that advocated screening for colon cancer. Information-seeking behavior was operationalized as reading time for a subsequent message about colon cancer. The proposed mediation model successfully reproduced the pattern of data, thereby providing evidence that PE predicts behavior via intention.     

Lifelong Debt: Rates of Return to Mature Study

High rates of return to first degrees have been used to justify increased student financial contributions to higher education. However, no discrete study of rates of return to mature graduates has been carried out although mature graduates now form a significant proportion of the student population. The General Household Survey 1983–1992 was used to examine the earnings of mature graduates compared with those of matriculates. The GHS yielded 616 mature graduate men in full-time work and 296 mature graduate women who were in full-time employment. It was found that the rate of return to mature male graduates was just above one per cent. With recent added costs, new male mature graduates can be forecast to make a sizeable loss on their study. Rates of return to women mature graduates were higher, between five and six per cent, and, based on these figures, the recent increased cost of mature graduate study should be covered by increased earnings. However, these calculations are based on average earnings for the modal age cohort of mature graduates. Those who are older when they complete or earn below the average (a large percentage) will not recoup the costs of study.