2014 IJBE Front Matter

Editorial Board President\u27s Letter SIEC-ISBE Internationa

ConfSys3.5: A Kaizen Conference Management System

After over a decade and half of the development and improvement based on real experience, the third generation of ConfSys (ConfSys3) not only possesses features such as user-group management, daemon and multi-track academic meetings, but also is able to support multi-series academic conference. The experience with these previous versions of ConfSys pointed to the need for better usability and additional features for system management. This thesis presents the design and implementation of ConfSys3.5, a kaizen conference management system, with continuous improvements and new features to assist academics to manage the processes of their events, and to provide related services for author and conference participants. ConfSys3.5 uses the same Tomcat - Java Servlet/JSP - MySQL platform as previous versions of ConfSys, but has introduced Struts 2 in Java web application, improved database and user interfaces to address user’s requirements. Both user friendliness and efficiency in ConfSys3.5 have been improved thanks to the lessons learned from developing and using earlier versions of ConfSys. ConfSys3.5 not only improves usability, but also introduces new concepts, such as Auto Session Management and Program Generation to reduce repetitive work and make management work more flexible. Furthermore, the improved software framework and database provides clear structure and flexibility, thus making the maintenance and expansion of the software system easier

Budget reviews and commissions of audit in Australia

Examining the origins, conduct, conclusions of, and reactions to, previous budget reviews provides some indications about how the current National Commission of Audit might unfold. Introduction On 22 October 2013 the Abbott Government announced the appointment of a National Commission of Audit. In announcing the review, Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Cormann said ‘[i]t is …essential that the Commonwealth government live within its means and begin to pay down debt’. The review, headed by the president of the Business Council of Australia, Tony Shepherd AO, has broad terms of reference that are intended to allow it to ‘assess the role and scope of Government, as well as ensuring taxpayers’ money is spent wisely and in an efficient manner.\u27The other members of the Commission are the current head of the New South Wales Independent Regulatory and Pricing Tribunal, Dr Peter Boxall AO, former public servants Tony Cole AO and Robert Fisher AM, and former politician Amanda Vanstone. The appointment of the current Commission of Audit has not passed without criticism. For example, the Shadow Finance Minister, Tony Burke has described the review as a ‘Commission of Cuts,’ and declared that it was ‘an extraordinary outsourcing of the responsibilities of Government across to big business’. The current National Commission of Audit is but one in a long series of budget reviews that have been conducted by Commonwealth, state and territory governments in Australia. Many previous reviews have largely been forgotten by the general public and sometimes even by the governments that have commissioned them. Others provided broad recommendations that have assisted in providing coherence and purpose to what have usually been new administrations. Examining the origins, conduct and conclusions of, and reactions to previous reviews provides some indications about how the current National Commission of Audit might unfold. While every review is inevitably a product of its time and the political and economic circumstances in which it was commissioned, there are recurring themes that emerge from many of these exercises. Arguably, the general nature of the findings and recommendations of budget reviews can be broadly predicted, but how—and even if—governments respond to them cannot.  Examining past reviews may also show whether the current review has provided genuinely new approaches to managing and prioritising Commonwealth expenditure and service delivery, or has rehashed well-worn policy prescriptions posed repeatedly by prior reviews

Project Retrosight. Understanding the returns from cardiovascular and stroke research: Methodology Report

Copyright @ 2011 RAND Europe. All rights reserved. The full text article is available via the link below.This project explores the impacts arising from cardiovascular and stroke research funded 15-20 years ago and attempts to draw out aspects of the research, researcher or environment that are associated with high or low impact. The project is a case study-based review of 29 cardiovascular and stroke research grants, funded in Australia, Canada and UK between 1989 and 1993. The case studies focused on the individual grants but considered the development of the investigators and ideas involved in the research projects from initiation to the present day. Grants were selected through a stratified random selection approach that aimed to include both high- and low-impact grants. The key messages are as follows: 1) The cases reveal that a large and diverse range of impacts arose from the 29 grants studied. 2) There are variations between the impacts derived from basic biomedical and clinical research. 3) There is no correlation between knowledge production and wider impacts 4) The majority of economic impacts identified come from a minority of projects. 5) We identified factors that appear to be associated with high and low impact. This report presents the key observations of the study and an overview of the methods involved. It has been written for funders of biomedical and health research and health services, health researchers, and policy makers in those fields. It will also be of interest to those involved in research and impact evaluation.This study was initiated with internal funding from RAND Europe and HERG, with continuing funding from the UK National Institute for Health Research, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the National Heart Foundation of Australia. The UK Stroke Association and the British Heart Foundation provided support in kind through access to their archives

A critical review of a 21st-century Yoruba-English dictionary

Traballo Fin de Master Erasmus Mundus en Lexicografía. Curso 2022-2023Since the publication of the first dictionary of the Yoruba language, A Dictionary of Yoruba in 1843, a handful of other dictionaries have appeared with varying degrees of commercial success. One of them is the Yoruba Modern Practical Dictionary (YMPD) by Kayode J. Fakinlede, which was first published in 2003. It takes pride in its comprehensiveness, claiming to contain over 26,000 dictionary articles and extensive outer texts that cover scientific measurements and rudimentary mathematical terminology. This thesis reviews this widely acclaimed dictionary in an attempt to evaluate its strengths, weaknesses, unique features and its position in relation to earlier Yoruba dictionaries from the 19th and 20th centuries. In doing this, this thesis draws inspiration from the criteria for dictionary criticism proposed by Svensen (2009) and Hütsch (2017), as well as other relevant scholarly contributions to dictionary criticism. There is a shortage of academic reviews of Yoruba dictionaries. While David Olmsted’s (1959) and Robert G. Armstrong’s (1959) reviews of the Dictionary of Modern Yoruba (1958), as well as E. C. Rowlands’ (1971) review of A Dictionary of Yoruba Monosyllabic Verbs (1969) stand out, they are brief, typically not longer than three pages and focused on isolated areas of criticism. Fagborun (1992) albeit belatedly takes a more holistic approach to review the Dictionary of Modern Yoruba (1958). Furthermore, Adetoyese (2020) also reviews two pioneering Yoruba dictionaries, namely, A Dictionary of the Yoruba Language (1913) and Dictionary of Modern Yoruba (1958) - both from the 20th century respectively. Thus, it appears that in spite of the general shortage of academic reviews of Yoruba dictionaries, there seems to be a common tendency among reviewers to opt for reviewing the Dictionary of Modern Yoruba (1958), while neglecting other dictionaries. However, Adetoyese reviews the aforementioned in light of their roles and influence as pioneering dictionaries in their epochs. This motivates the author of this thesis to examine a Yoruba dictionary which, firstly is an influential work, secondly, belongs to a different period, and thirdly, also suffers from the lack of substantial academic review. Thus, the YPMD (2003) is reviewed in this thesis in terms of its contents and features and as a Yoruba dictionary for 21st-century users. In order to provide ample background knowledge on the object of this thesis, the opening chapter reflects on the Yoruba language and Yoruba lexicography. The second chapter introduces the dictionary in focus, the YPMD. The third chapter reviews the existing literature on dictionary criticism and highlights the methods of dictionary criticism to be used in the thesis. The fourth chapter criticises the lexicographical aspects of the YPMD, namely macrostructure, microstructure, mediostructure, frame structure and typographical presentation. The fifth chapter gives an overall assessment of the dictionary and some recommendations for possible revision and improvement, while the sixth chapter concludes the thesis

The Encyclopaedia as a Form of the Book

The field of book history is concerned with exploring the physical form of the book and the circumstances of its creation and reception, in order to gain insight into the societies and industries which produced and consumed it. Hitherto, comparatively little attention has been given to the encyclopaedia as a generic form of the book. The purpose of this thesis is to apply the research approaches taken in book history to the encyclopaedia in order to define it as a type of book. Original research was undertaken in three parts: review literature was analysed to identify the encyclopaedia’s functional attributes, a selection of titles were examined to discern their physical features and surveys and interviews were carried out in order to gather the opinions of the main participants in its communications circuit. Once a definition was formed, it was applied to online forms of encyclopaedia to consider whether the encyclopaedia has a generic signature which carries beyond the material form of the book. The findings show that the encyclopaedia has a distinct identity, both in terms of the characteristics for which it is valued, and its physical components. This identity distinguishes it not just from familiar, much-studied forms of the book such as the novel, but also from other reference books such as dictionaries. The findings also demonstrate that many of these characteristics are present in the online forms of the encyclopaedia, even where technology might have made them unnecessary or irrelevant. While the definition formulated of the encyclopaedia is not a challenging one, it demonstrates that it is possible to formulate a toolkit for the identification of literary forms, and to apply it to new forms of book types, such as online versions. Refinement of this toolkit and application to other forms of the book could reveal new insights into the nature of different literary genres and their relationships to each other and to their readers’ expectations

Keeping Research Data Safe 2: Final Report

The first Keeping Research Data Safe study funded by JISC made a major contribution to understanding of long-term preservation costs for research data by developing a cost model and indentifying cost variables for preserving research data in UK universities (Beagrie et al, 2008). However it was completed over a very constrained timescale of four months with little opportunity to follow up other major issues or sources of preservation cost information it identified. It noted that digital preservation costs are notoriously difficult to address in part because of the absence of good case studies and longitudinal information for digital preservation costs or cost variables. In January 2009 JISC issued an ITT for a study on the identification of long-lived digital datasets for the purposes of cost analysis. The aim of this work was to provide a larger body of material and evidence against which existing and future data preservation cost modelling exercises could be tested and validated. The proposal for the KRDS2 study was submitted in response by a consortium consisting of 4 partners involved in the original Keeping Research Data Safe study (Universities of Cambridge and Southampton, Charles Beagrie Ltd, and OCLC Research) and 4 new partners with significant data collections and interests in preservation costs (Archaeology Data Service, University of London Computer Centre, University of Oxford, and the UK Data Archive). A range of supplementary materials in support of this main report have been made available on the KRDS2 project website at http://www.beagrie.com/jisc.php. That website will be maintained and continuously updated with future work as a resource for KRDS users

The Chicago Counter-Revolution and the Sociology of Economic Knowledge

This chapter is concerned with the internal phenomenon. One model that can be invoked to explain this internal phenomenon is the classical process whereby evidence is patiently accumulated until the weight of the argument favours one side or another. Alternatively, Stigler\u27s \u27model\u27 of the sociology of economic knowledge construction and destruction can be used to examine the internal opinion-changing process in the transition from the overwhelming defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 to the overwhelming victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980 - two men with essentially the same programme and the same message (Friedman and Friedman 1982, viii). ISBN: 033373045

Report on Grouped Peer Review of Scholarly Journals in Education

CITE: Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) (2020) ‘Report on Grouped Peer Review of Scholarly Journals in Education’. [Online] DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/assaf.2019/0062The peer review report entitled Report on Grouped Peer Review of Scholarly Journals in Education is the tenth in a series of discipline-grouped evaluations of South African scholarly journals. This is part of a scholarly assurance process initiated by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). The process is centered on multi-perspective, discipline-based evaluation panels appointed by the Academy Council on the recommendation of the Academy’s Committee on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa (CSPiSA). This detailed report presents the peer review panel’s consolidated consensus reports on each journal and provides the panel’s recommendations in respect of DHET accreditation, inclusion on the SciELO SA platform and suggestions for improvement in general. The main purpose of the ASSAf review process for journals is to improve the scholarly publication in the country that is consonant with traditional scholarly practices.Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf