Development and construction of China

Libraries in China's higher education institutions have been developing in keeping pace with the flourishing development of China's higher education. This article aims to make an introduction to the construction of China's higher education libraries, especially the recent three decades' achievements since China's reform and opening-up in 1978. In this article, the authors draw a general picture of the development of libraries in China's higher education institutions, covering such eight aspects as management, types and positioning, organizational structure and personnel, expenditure and buildings, reader service, building and sharing of resources as well as automation system.</p

Comparing Typical Opening Move Choices Made by Humans and Chess Engines

The opening book is an important component of a chess engine, and thus computer chess programmers have been developing automated methods to improve the quality of their books. For chess, which has a very rich opening theory, large databases of high-quality games can be used as the basis of an opening book, from which statistics relating to move choices from given positions can be collected. In order to find out whether the opening books used by modern chess engines in machine versus machine competitions are ``comparable'' to those used by chess players in human versus human competitions, we carried out analysis on 26 test positions using statistics from two opening books one compiled from humans' games and the other from machines' games. Our analysis using several nonparametric measures, shows that, overall, there is a strong association between humans' and machines' choices of opening moves when using a book to guide their choices.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 6 table

Campus Update: February 1992 v. 4, no. 1

Monthly newsletter of the BU Medical Campu

A new library in Bloomsbury: relocating the UCL SSEES Library

Purpose – The paper seeks to describe the processes involved in an academic library building project, from the choice of site and appointment of the architects to the move itself. The focus is on finding solutions to problems caused by limited space, fixed deadlines and innovative design, and ensuring that the Library needs are fully understood throughout a complex project involving other interest groups over a number of years. Design/methodology/approach – The experience of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library is used as a case study to describe various issues around library design, working with architects and project managers, and managing a library move. Reference is made to the impact of the 7 July bombings in London on library staff. Findings – The case study outlines the importance of Library involvement in every aspect of the design, the impact of decisions about internal layout on library capacity, the adaptability of library staff to unusual and difficult working conditions, the possibility of providing a limited service in an incomplete building, the importance of balancing aesthetic and functional considerations in the final design, and the impact of those design decisions on the long-term functioning and use of the Library. Originality/value – The paper describes most of the processes and problems likely to be encountered in a major library building project and will be useful to any library setting out on such a project

Reviews

Brian Clegg, Mining The Internet — Information Gathering and Research on the Net, Kogan Page: London, 1999. ISBN: 0–7494–3025–7. Paperback, 147 pages, £9.99

Introduction: Finding common ground beyond fragmentation

This chapter begins with an outline of the European context within which the twenty six research papers presented in this book emerged. A particularly important aspect of this context is Network 27 on Didactics, Learning and Teaching of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) which formed the core of the research community in which this work was developed over a five year period (2006-11). The next part of the chapter provides an overview of the six sections which make up the structure of the book as a whole. A discussion then follows of the clear continental divide with respect to didactics, learning and teaching in the European landscape which is based on the references used by the contributors to this book. This leads to a consideration of the historical origin of present-day didactics which can be traced back to a common heritage in the work of Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670) in order to provide a platform in the search for common ground. In the section which then follows there is a discussion of the didactic triad as a tool for holding the complexity of teaching-studying-learning situations and this is considered in an expanded context in which classroom interaction in the school is placed within a wider societal context. Based on a review of the contributions to this book, the final parts of this chapter consider existing knowledge gaps between different national traditions and also identify themes that form the basis for building and extending common ground. The themes that have been identified through this process of synthesis relate to pedagogical content knowledge, learner knowledge, joint didactical action, curriculum research, the so called shift from teaching to learning, the philosophy of Bildung and its practical implications, links between theory and practice and the significant role of experimental schools. Finally these themes are proposed for consideration within the wider research, policy and practice community as the basis for future international co-operation that offer the potential to advance mutual understanding and common insights in this fiel

Contesting Europe: representations of space in English school geography

The development of national education systems was premised on the assumption that they would offer particular representations of the ‘national space’, and school subjects such as geography and history offered pupils specific accounts of space and time. The project of European integration suggests the need for school curricula to offer alternative ways of imagining space. This essay examines the representation of European space in school geography textbooks. The analysis suggests that the texts contain different versions of the ‘politics of space’ and that there is a need for a critically-reflexive stance on the ‘geographies of Europe’ as taught in schools

Statistical Feature Combination for the Evaluation of Game Positions

This article describes an application of three well-known statistical methods in the field of game-tree search: using a large number of classified Othello positions, feature weights for evaluation functions with a game-phase-independent meaning are estimated by means of logistic regression, Fisher's linear discriminant, and the quadratic discriminant function for normally distributed features. Thereafter, the playing strengths are compared by means of tournaments between the resulting versions of a world-class Othello program. In this application, logistic regression - which is used here for the first time in the context of game playing - leads to better results than the other approaches.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file