45,674 research outputs found
Online Permaculture Resources: An Evaluation of a Selected Sample
As a newly-emerging, sustainable approach to landscape management, permaculture seeks to integrate knowledge from several disciplines into a holistic system with emphasis on ecological and social responsibility. Online resources on permaculture appear to represent a promising direction in the movement by supplementing existing printed sources, serving to update and diversify existing content, and increasing access to permaculture information and praxis among the general public. This study evaluated a sample of online resources on permaculture using a framework of parameters reflecting website usability and content quality. Best practice for website usability, as well as diversity of information and applicability, was addressed. The evaluation revealed, overall, good quality and usability in the majority of cases, and suggests a strong online presence among the existing permaculture community, and accessible support for those with an interest in joining the movement
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Reaching out with OER: the new role of public-facing open scholar
Open educational resources (OER) and, more recently, open educational practices (OEP) have been widely promoted as a means of increasing openness in higher education (HE). Thus far, such openness has been limited by OER provision typically being supplier-driven and contained within the boundaries of HE. Seeking to explore ways in which OEP might become more needs-led we conceptualised a new ‘public-facing open scholar’ role involving academics working with online communities to source and develop OER to meet their needs.
To explore the scope for this role we focused on the voluntary sector, which we felt might particularly benefit from such collaboration. We evaluated four representative communities for evidence of their being self-educating (thereby offering the potential for academics to contribute) and for any existing learning dimension. We found that all four communities were self-educating and each included learning infrastructure elements, for example provision for web chats with ‘experts’, together with evidence of receptiveness to academic collaboration. This indicated that there was scope for the role of public-facing open scholar. We therefore developed detailed guidelines for performing the role, which has the potential to be applied beyond the voluntary sector and to greatly extend the beneficial impact of existing OER, prompting institutions to release new OER in response to the needs of people outside HE
Towards Query Logs for Privacy Studies: On Deriving Search Queries from Questions
Translating verbose information needs into crisp search queries is a
phenomenon that is ubiquitous but hardly understood. Insights into this process
could be valuable in several applications, including synthesizing large
privacy-friendly query logs from public Web sources which are readily available
to the academic research community. In this work, we take a step towards
understanding query formulation by tapping into the rich potential of community
question answering (CQA) forums. Specifically, we sample natural language (NL)
questions spanning diverse themes from the Stack Exchange platform, and conduct
a large-scale conversion experiment where crowdworkers submit search queries
they would use when looking for equivalent information. We provide a careful
analysis of this data, accounting for possible sources of bias during
conversion, along with insights into user-specific linguistic patterns and
search behaviors. We release a dataset of 7,000 question-query pairs from this
study to facilitate further research on query understanding.Comment: ECIR 2020 Short Pape
REST: A Thread Embedding Approach for Identifying and Classifying User-specified Information in Security Forums
How can we extract useful information from a security forum? We focus on
identifying threads of interest to a security professional: (a) alerts of
worrisome events, such as attacks, (b) offering of malicious services and
products, (c) hacking information to perform malicious acts, and (d) useful
security-related experiences. The analysis of security forums is in its infancy
despite several promising recent works. Novel approaches are needed to address
the challenges in this domain: (a) the difficulty in specifying the "topics" of
interest efficiently, and (b) the unstructured and informal nature of the text.
We propose, REST, a systematic methodology to: (a) identify threads of interest
based on a, possibly incomplete, bag of words, and (b) classify them into one
of the four classes above. The key novelty of the work is a multi-step weighted
embedding approach: we project words, threads and classes in appropriate
embedding spaces and establish relevance and similarity there. We evaluate our
method with real data from three security forums with a total of 164k posts and
21K threads. First, REST robustness to initial keyword selection can extend the
user-provided keyword set and thus, it can recover from missing keywords.
Second, REST categorizes the threads into the classes of interest with superior
accuracy compared to five other methods: REST exhibits an accuracy between
63.3-76.9%. We see our approach as a first step for harnessing the wealth of
information of online forums in a user-friendly way, since the user can loosely
specify her keywords of interest
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REST: A thread embedding approach for identifying and classifying user-specified information in security forums
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