ALIA LIS research environmental scan report

Executive summary: An environmental scan of Australian Library and Information Studies (LIS) research was undertaken focusing on the period 2005–2013. This was in response to a brief from ALIA that sought such an analysis to inform its decisions in relation to content of a future research agenda, support, advocacy, and future funding. The investigation was expected to include research priorities of other library and information organisations, topics of research undertaken in Australia, types of research, persons/organisations undertaking research, and how research activities are funded, communicated and applied. The report took into account: research priorities of LIS professional associations both within and outside Australia production of higher degree theses over the period publication by practitioners and academics in both Australian and international publications and grant or other support for research or investigatory projects. METHODOLOGY AND LIMITATIONS: Methodologies employed included: Website analysis for research priorities of LIS organisations Database searching using Trove for higher degree theses Database searching using multiple databases for publications In the case of research in progress and resourcing via grants, methods employed were database searching, consultation and by survey methods The limitations in these approaches are explained in each related Section or Appendix. However, the major limitations were: Poor response to the online survey despite its wide dissemination through ALIA and other associations Inconsistent responses to individual surveys directed specifically at academic departments Coverage of publications by databases, particularly of material outside periodicals Difficulties in categorising document

Variables Predicting the Severity of a Mass Shooting: the connection to white supremacy

Since mass shootings have become increasingly relevant in today’s society, the subject of what makes a mass shooting deadly has become more and more popular. This project focuses on how selected variables correlate with the severity of a mass shooting, and especially focuses on the impact of white supremacy ideology. Theoretically, a shooter imbued with this ideology will likely be more violent, thus causing a higher victim count (injuries + deaths). The other variables included in the model are: the use of a long gun, the use of multiple guns, the use of semi-automatic guns, mental illness, and shooter suicide. This project seeks to assess the relationships of these variables to the victim count, and the statistical significance of each of these relationships. By drawing from two prominent mass-shooting databases and associated media sources, a dataset was constructed, then analyzed with correlation, regression, and ANOVA. These analyses confirmed all of the hypotheses, with predictor variable correlating positively and significantly to victim count. Most importantly, the findings confirmed the significance of the white supremacy ideology variable in predicting the violence of a mass shooting, and the effect withstood the introduction of a variety of important control variables; in short, shooters with a white supremacy background tend to inflict a higher victim count during a mass shooting. Based on these findings, suggestions for further research include separating active-shooter mass shootings from other types of mass shootings; standardizing the operational definition of a mass shooting; and increasing the number of possible predictor variables in current mass shooting databases

The effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of respite for caregivers of frail older people

The proportion of frail elderly people in the industrialized world is increasing. Respite care is a potentially important way of maintaining the quality of life for these people and their caregivers. The objective of this systematic review was to determine the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of different models of community-based respite care for frail older people and their caregivers. To identify relevant studies, 37 databases were searched, and reference checking and citation searches were undertaken. Well-controlled effectiveness studies were eligible for inclusion, with uncontrolled studies admissible only in the absence of higher-quality evidence. Studies assessed the effect of community-based respite on caregivers of frail elderly people relative to usual care or to another support intervention. Eligible economic evaluations also addressed costs. Where appropriate, data were synthesized using standard meta-analytic techniques. Ten randomized, controlled trials, seven quasi-experimental studies and five uncontrolled studies were included in the review. For all types of respite, the effects upon caregivers were generally small, with better-controlled studies finding modest benefits only for certain subgroups, although many studies reported high levels of caregiver satisfaction. No reliable evidence was found that respite care delays entry to residential care or adversely affects frail older people. The economic evaluations all assessed day care, which tended to be associated with similar or higher costs than usual care. Given the increasing numbers of frail elderly people and the lack of up-to-date, good-quality evidence for all types of respite care, better-quality evidence is urgently needed to inform current policy and practice

Does tariff liberalization increase wage inequality ? - Some empirical evidence

The objective of the paper is to answer an often asked question: If tariff rates are reduced, what will happen to wage inequality? The authors consider two types of wage inequality: between occupations (skills premium) and between industries. They use two large databases of wage inequality that have recently become available and a large data set of average tariff rates covering the period between 1980 and 2000. The authors find that tariff reduction is associated with higher inter-occupational and inter-industry inequality in poorer countries (those below the world median income) and the reverse in richer countries. However, the results for inter-occupational inequality must be treated with caution.Inequality,Environmental Economics&Policies,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research

Fuzzy and non-fuzzy approaches for digital image classification

This paper classifies different digital images using two types of clustering algorithms. The first type is the fuzzy clustering methods, while the second type considers the non-fuzzy methods. For the performance comparisons, we apply four clustering algorithms with two from the fuzzy type and the other two from the non-fuzzy (partitonal) clustering type. The automatic partitional clustering algorithm and the partitional k-means algorithm are chosen as the two examples of the non-fuzzy clustering techniques, while the automatic fuzzy algorithm and the fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm are taken as the examples of the fuzzy clustering techniques. The evaluation among the four algorithms are done by implementing these algorithms to three different types of image databases, based on the comparison criteria of: dataset size, cluster number, execution time and classification accuracy and k-cross validation. The experimental results demonstrate that the non-fuzzy algorithms have higher accuracies in compared to the fuzzy algorithms, especially when dealing with large data sizes and different types of images. Three types of image databases of human face images, handwritten digits and natural scenes are used for the performance evaluation

Temporal Support in Relational Databases

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. © 2012 Higher Education AcademyThis paper examines the current state of temporal support in relational databases and the type of situations where we need that support. There has been much research in this area and there were attempts in the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) standards committees in the late 1990s to add an extension called TSQL2 to the existing SQL standard. However no agreement could be reached as it was felt that some of the suggested extensions did not fit well with the relational model, as well as being difficult to implement. TSQL2 was abandoned and since then vendors have added their own data types, and if we are lucky, operators too in an attempt to provide support. However, to novice students and database designers it is often not apparent why some temporal concepts are difficult to deal with in a relational database. In teaching these concepts to students we use a Case Study (based on a real example) which illustrates the problems of providing temporal support by using examples of the data types which could be useful to solve temporal problems and the operators which are necessary to provide this

The impact of sequence database choice on metaproteomic results in gut microbiota studies

Background: Elucidating the role of gut microbiota in physiological and pathological processes has recently emerged as a key research aim in life sciences. In this respect, metaproteomics, the study of the whole protein complement of a microbial community, can provide a unique contribution by revealing which functions are actually being expressed by specific microbial taxa. However, its wide application to gut microbiota research has been hindered by challenges in data analysis, especially related to the choice of the proper sequence databases for protein identification. Results: Here, we present a systematic investigation of variables concerning database construction and annotation and evaluate their impact on human and mouse gut metaproteomic results. We found that both publicly available and experimental metagenomic databases lead to the identification of unique peptide assortments, suggesting parallel database searches as a mean to gain more complete information. In particular, the contribution of experimental metagenomic databases was revealed to be mandatory when dealing with mouse samples. Moreover, the use of a "merged" database, containing all metagenomic sequences from the population under study, was found to be generally preferable over the use of sample-matched databases. We also observed that taxonomic and functional results are strongly database-dependent, in particular when analyzing the mouse gut microbiota. As a striking example, the Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio varied up to tenfold depending on the database used. Finally, assembling reads into longer contigs provided significant advantages in terms of functional annotation yields. Conclusions: This study contributes to identify host- and database-specific biases which need to be taken into account in a metaproteomic experiment, providing meaningful insights on how to design gut microbiota studies and to perform metaproteomic data analysis. In particular, the use of multiple databases and annotation tools has to be encouraged, even though this requires appropriate bioinformatic resources