‘Being an artist you kind of, I mean, you get used to excellence’: Identity, Values and Fine Art Assessment Practices

In this article I report on a study into fine art lecturers’ assessment practices in higher education. This study explores the ways that lecturers bring themselves into the act of assessment (Hand & Clewes 2000). I interviewed twelve fine art lecturers who worked across six English universities. Lecturers were asked to relate to me how they learnt to assess student artwork and what informed their judgement making. My research explores the interfaces between fine art lecturers’ assessment practices, their values and identity/ies. My analysis offers a rendering of the ways that values underpin lecturers’ assessment practices. The article explores the ways that lecturers’ assessment decisions relate to their experiences as ex art students, their identity as artists, their own artistic practices, their conceptualisation of the arts arenas and the HE sector. My key overarching argument is that identity/ies and values underpin and enrich fine art lecturers’ assessment practices

The performance of farm animal assessment

This paper argues that the current drive towards greater use of animal-based measures for welfare assessment raises important issues for how farm visits by welfare assessors are performed. As social scientists, we employ a number of contemporary social science ideas to offer a new approach to examining the practice and performance of farm animal assessment. We identify key findings from a recent study of contemporary farm assessment and speculate upon what some of the challenges of introducing animal-based measures may be. We conclude by arguing for a greater awareness of how sets of knowledge are made, circulated, practiced and become an integral component of the procedures, practices and discourses around farm animal welfare assessment in farm assuranc

ISOWN: accurate somatic mutation identification in the absence of normal tissue controls.

BackgroundA key step in cancer genome analysis is the identification of somatic mutations in the tumor. This is typically done by comparing the genome of the tumor to the reference genome sequence derived from a normal tissue taken from the same donor. However, there are a variety of common scenarios in which matched normal tissue is not available for comparison.ResultsIn this work, we describe an algorithm to distinguish somatic single nucleotide variants (SNVs) in next-generation sequencing data from germline polymorphisms in the absence of normal samples using a machine learning approach. Our algorithm was evaluated using a family of supervised learning classifications across six different cancer types and ~1600 samples, including cell lines, fresh frozen tissues, and formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues; we tested our algorithm with both deep targeted and whole-exome sequencing data. Our algorithm correctly classified between 95 and 98% of somatic mutations with F1-measure ranges from 75.9 to 98.6% depending on the tumor type. We have released the algorithm as a software package called ISOWN (Identification of SOmatic mutations Without matching Normal tissues).ConclusionsIn this work, we describe the development, implementation, and validation of ISOWN, an accurate algorithm for predicting somatic mutations in cancer tissues in the absence of matching normal tissues. ISOWN is available as Open Source under Apache License 2.0 from https://github.com/ikalatskaya/ISOWN

How to Evaluate your Question Answering System Every Day and Still Get Real Work Done

In this paper, we report on Qaviar, an experimental automated evaluation system for question answering applications. The goal of our research was to find an automatically calculated measure that correlates well with human judges' assessment of answer correctness in the context of question answering tasks. Qaviar judges the response by computing recall against the stemmed content words in the human-generated answer key. It counts the answer correct if it exceeds agiven recall threshold. We determined that the answer correctness predicted by Qaviar agreed with the human 93% to 95% of the time. 41 question-answering systems were ranked by both Qaviar and human assessors, and these rankings correlated with a Kendall's Tau measure of 0.920, compared to a correlation of 0.956 between human assessors on the same data.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2000

Jobcentre Plus or minus? Exploring the performance of Jobcentre Plus for non-jobseekers

Since April 2002 Jobcentre Plus has started to operate nationwide in the UK providing fully integrated benefit claiming and work placement/job-seeking activities for people of working age. This new organisation put an explicit work-focus in the delivery of the benefit system. Along with Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) claimants who traditionally have been the focus of relevant work-focused policies, Jobcentre Plus targets a much wider group of clients including lone parents, disabled people and carers. Although the work-focus of the new organisation could be beneficial for clients who themselves have an explicit work orientation, its effect on clients for whom work is not a feasible option are far less clear. This paper explores whether the changes in the delivery of the benefit system introduced by Jobcentre Plus have been beneficial for claimants who are not jobseekers and assesses which aspects of the new organisation work well and which could be improved in order to address more effectively the needs of non-job-oriented clients

Comptroller\u27s Review of the Costs of Real Property Tax Assessment in Erie County

The New York State Office of Real Property Services (“NYSORPS”) has stated that “New York\u27s property tax system is, arguably, the most complex and confusing in the country.” NYSORPS data show that there are 1,133 distinct assessing units in New York State, as contrasted with 59 in California. Only the State of Michigan has more assessing units than New York State. In Erie County, thirty (30) municipal governments consisting of cities, towns and villages assess real property. For many years, NYSORPS has been encouraging local governments across the state to consider terminating their assessment functions and utilizing other, more efficient potentialities, including countywide assessment. Recently, elected state leaders have joined this movement