Conference report: 18th conference on computer-assisted qualitative data analysis (CAQD) 2016: MAXQDA user conference

During the first week of March 2016, 120 researchers from 12 different countries, including Syria, Japan, the USA and Turkey, met in Berlin (Germany) to learn more about their computer-assisted qualitative data analysis skills. The 18th Conference on Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQD) offered several workshops, a research methods poster session, and the opportunity to share and discuss best practice between attendees, trainers and speakers (informally and through the user forum). The conference also hosted three seminal keynote speakers in two presentations: John CRESWELL, and Udo KUCKARTZ and Stefan RÄDIKER, who shared, respectively, the state of the art of mixed methods and the ways that software can support these approaches

Recognition and reward system for peer-reviewers

Peer reviewing plays an important role in the academic publishing process that scrutinizes and provides feedback on the scientific work prior to publication. Peer-reviewers put their efforts in reviewing others research work voluntarily, without any expectations of incentives or rewards. The peer-review process has been criticized for its defects like slowness, bias and abuse of the process. In this paper, we present a model to address these issues by using the approach of recording peer-review data on the blockchain. By using the semantic web and linked data technologies, this system would be able to expose its data and interact with other systems. This system will be used to quantify, recognize and incentivize the peer-reviewing efforts by researchers

Academy Recommendations on the Proposed Yucca Mountain Waste Repository: Overview and Criticisms

Offers alternative criticism of the NAS report

Wicked Problems and Gnarly Results: Reflecting on Design and Evaluation Methods for Idiosyncratic Personal Information Management Tasks

This paper is a case study of an artifact design and evaluation process; it is a reflection on how right thinking about design methods may at times result in sub-optimal results. Our goal has been to assess our decision making process throughout the design and evaluation stages for a software prototype in order to consider where design methodology may need to be tuned to be more sensitive to the domain of practice, in this case software evaluation in personal information management. In particular, we reflect on design methods around (1) scale of prototype, (2) prototyping and design process, (3) study design, and (4) study population

A Competency-based Approach toward Curricular Guidelines for Information Technology Education

The Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society have launched a new report titled, Curriculum Guidelines for Baccalaureate Degree Programs in Information Technology (IT2017). This paper discusses significant aspects of the IT2017 report and focuses on competency-driven learning rather than delivery of knowledge in information technology (IT) programs. It also highlights an IT curricular framework that meets the growing demands of a changing technological world in the next decade. Specifically, the paper outlines ways by which baccalaureate IT programs might implement the IT curricular framework and prepare students with knowledge, skills, and dispositions to equip graduates with competencies that matter in the workplace. The paper suggests that a focus on competencies allows academic departments to forge collaborations with employers and engage students in professional practice experiences. It also shows how professionals and educators might use the report in reviewing, updating, and creating baccalaureate IT degree programs worldwide

The Defensive Effect of Medical Practice Policies in Malpractice Litigation

The theoretical prospects for medical practice policies to reform malpractice law by giving conclusive defensive effect to medical custom were studied. A practice policy, however rigorous, is of no use if the nature of the claimed error is either incorrect performance of the treatment in question or failure to recognize the correct practice policy to employ by virtue of a falure in diagnosis

Extracting corpus specific knowledge bases from Wikipedia

Thesauri are useful knowledge structures for assisting information retrieval. Yet their production is labor-intensive, and few domains have comprehensive thesauri that cover domain-specific concepts and contemporary usage. One approach, which has been attempted without much success for decades, is to seek statistical natural language processing algorithms that work on free text. Instead, we propose to replace costly professional indexers with thousands of dedicated amateur volunteers--namely, those that are producing Wikipedia. This vast, open encyclopedia represents a rich tapestry of topics and semantics and a huge investment of human effort and judgment. We show how this can be directly exploited to provide WikiSauri: manually-defined yet inexpensive thesaurus structures that are specifically tailored to expose the topics, terminology and semantics of individual document collections. We also offer concrete evidence of the effectiveness of WikiSauri for assisting information retrieval

Focal Spot, Winter 2004/2005

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/focal_spot_archives/1098/thumbnail.jp