The Breeder’s Eye – Theoretical Aspects of the Breeder’s Decision-Making

The report describes an empirical research project which investigated the peculiarity and role of knowledge gained through experience in plant breeding from the breeder’s perspective. In this paper, a theory respecting the breeder’s decision-making process will be presented. The categories of knowledge that are important for the decision-making process will be sketched and three levels of consciousness elaborated. The integration of all levels of knowledge and consciousness is what in the end determines whether the breeder’s decision-making activities are competent or not. This complexity is defined as intuition in the sense of an invariant present. The empirical findings will be briefly discussed with respect to their importance to organic agricultural science and organic plant breeding

Colonial modernism and the flawed paradigms of urban renewal: the uneven development of Bombay City 1900-1925

This article explores the failure of urban renewal in Bombay city during the first quarter of the twentieth century. It shows how colonial rule structured a class-driven process of uneven urban 'improvements' that actually exacerbated the problems of congestion, bad housing and environmental blight. In this process, the new forces of modernity were selectively appropriated to accentuate the differentiation in built forms and urban spaces. Finally, through implicit comparisons with contemporary developments in Europe, it reveals the limitations of urban regeneration in a laissez-faire colonial capitalist environment where the search for quick returns by competing economic actors precluded the adoption of long-term policies and interventionist strategies necessary to create the good city life

Economies of scale in the library world: the Dr Martin Luther King Jr Library in San Jose, California

Discusses the new Dr Martin Luther King Jr Library in San Jose´, California, which will house the collections of the San Jose´ Public Library’s main branch and the San Jose´ State University’s Library system in one new building. Outlines the conception of the project, the site selection and the planning process. Considers the communities served, usage patterns and services. Focuses on the management structure and operations in light of a, perhaps controversial, aspect of mixing city and university library staff under the same roof, some performing similar functions, but with different supervisors and employing agencies. Discusses the new library in the context of other joint-use libraries and in the context of economies of scale and future trends. Evaluates the arising challenges and opportunities

Summarisation and visualisation of e-Health data repositories

At the centre of the Clinical e-Science Framework (CLEF) project is a repository of well organised, detailed clinical histories, encoded as data that will be available for use in clinical care and in-silico medical experiments. We describe a system that we have developed as part of the CLEF project, to perform the task of generating a diverse range of textual and graphical summaries of a patient’s clinical history from a data-encoded model, a chronicle, representing the record of the patient’s medical history. Although the focus of our current work is on cancer patients, the approach we describe is generalisable to a wide range of medical areas

Incorporating Online Instruction in Academic Libraries: Getting Ahead of the Curve

A sea change in higher education is shaping the way many libraries deliver instruction to their students and faculty. Years of technological innovation and changes in the way that people discover and use information has made online instruction an essential part of a library\u27s teaching and learning program. In order to evaluate our library\u27s online instruction program and to determine its future goals, we analyzed the technology, pedagogical models, organizational structures, administrative supports, and partnerships we would need in order to succeed. Our findings may be useful for libraries reassessing their own online instruction programs

Forever is a Long Time: Reconsidering Universities' Perpetual Endowment Policies in the Twenty - First Century

College and university officials in the United States have long invoked a combination of Anglo-Saxon legal precedents, plus the obligations of responsible philanthropic stewardship, to justify policies of perpetual endowments. Closely related to this general principle has been the practice of not spending more than the annual earnings (in other words, interest and dividends) from an endowment. Our historical analysis provides a counter to this contemporary conventional wisdom that has been accepted with little critical consideration in American higher education. Rediscovery of philosophical arguments, and actual cases of foundations and philanthropists who placed limits on the life span of gifts, demonstrates how historical research can provide an informed base for reconsideration of government and institutional policies and practices that shape giving and spending at colleges and universities in the twenty-first century.The grounding in economics for our study is Howard Bowen's 1980 "revenue theory" of college costs. The historical precedent for our policy analysis comes from eighteenth-century France, as advanced by A.J. Turgot, to shape national economic development. Its implications for higher education in the United States is illustrated by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller's reservations about a perpetual endowment for an educational project: "Forever is a long time . . ." Our historical research addresses the consequences -- pro and con -- of government policies requiring colleges to spend endowments at more than a marginal annual rate and in a fixed period of time; and, secondly, are there good reasons for donors to colleges to voluntarily opt to increase spending and place time limits on gifts

Structural variation in generated health reports

We present a natural language generator that produces a range of medical reports on the clinical histories of cancer patients, and discuss the problem of conceptual restatement in generating various textual views of the same conceptual content. We focus on two features of our system: the demand for 'loose paraphrases' between the various reports on a given patient, with a high degree of semantic overlap but some necessary amount of distinctive content; and the requirement for paraphrasing at primarily the discourse level