Crowdsourcing Paper Screening in Systematic Literature Reviews

Literature reviews allow scientists to stand on the shoulders of giants, showing promising directions, summarizing progress, and pointing out existing challenges in research. At the same time conducting a systematic literature review is a laborious and consequently expensive process. In the last decade, there have a few studies on crowdsourcing in literature reviews. This paper explores the feasibility of crowdsourcing for facilitating the literature review process in terms of results, time and effort, as well as to identify which crowdsourcing strategies provide the best results based on the budget available. In particular we focus on the screening phase of the literature review process and we contribute and assess methods for identifying the size of tests, labels required per paper, and classification functions as well as methods to split the crowdsourcing process in phases to improve results. Finally, we present our findings based on experiments run on Crowdflower

Ten Great Books on Church History

We are blessed to live at a time when a number of gifted scholars devote their time and talents to illuminating the story of the Christian church. They stand on the shoulders of giants from centuries past whose work has passed on to us the legacy of the cloud of witnesses who have gone before us. Posting about great books on church history from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world. http://inallthings.org/ten-great-books-on-church-history

Daniel Eccleston of Lancaster 1745-1821: A Man not Afraid to Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

It is unusual for an historian to be able to establish in great detail the life of any but those considered one of \u27the great and the good\u27. The substantial amount of documentary sources, both by, and about, the Quaker radical Daniel Eccleston of Lancaster (1745-1821), provide an opportunity to view a turbulent period in British history through the experiences of one individual. The links between industrial and scientific advance, Nonconformity in religion and calls for political reform were growing increasingly common as the eighteenth century progressed. This paper attempts to show the centrality of Eccleston\u27s Quaker upbringing to his later political radicalisation. Although Eccleston was not an Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Paine or Richard Price, he was an Enlightenment radical, prepared to defend with his pen and a consequent loss of his liberty, the rights of the British to freedom of thought, speech, worship and writing

A catalog of stream processing optimizations

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Various research communities have independently arrived at stream processing as a programming model for efficient and parallel computing. These communities include digital signal processing, databases, operating systems, and complex event processing. Since each community faces applications with challenging performance requirements, each of them has developed some of the same optimizations, but often with conflicting terminology and unstated assumptions. This article presents a survey of optimizations for stream processing. It is aimed both at users who need to understand and guide the system's optimizer and at implementers who need to make engineering tradeoffs. To consolidate terminology, this article is organized as a catalog, in a style similar to catalogs of design patterns or refactorings. To make assumptions explicit and help understand tradeoffs, each optimization is presented with its safety constraints (when does it preserve correctness?) and a profitability experiment (when does it improve performance?). We hope that this survey will help future streaming system builders to stand on the shoulders of giants from not just their own community. © 2014 ACM

Guide to Social Change Led By and With Young People

THE FREECHILD PROJECT HAS BEEN DOING THIS FOR A WHILE. In the five years since we began, The Freechild Project has identified three powerful trends in social change led by and with young people: 1. Social change led by young people is not all about young people. Instead, children and youth are working for their communities, their families, their cities, and their world. Action that is focused on youth issues often addresses young people as a whole, not isolating other youth because of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. 2. More action has led to more sophistication, creating more sustainable outcomes. Youth-led social change is not new; the tools and strategies being developed stand on the shoulders of giants from more than a century ago. However, the increasing sophistication and intentionality have heightened the effectiveness of youths\u27 approaches and deepened the impacts they are having throughout communities. 3. A broad youth movement exists today. Media is not talking about it, researchers are generally not aware of it, and even young people do not know they belong to it. However, this decentralization in social movements today is part of a trend called The Multitudes, in which localized action without focal-point leaders is subtly, powerfully changing the world

Technological Progress under Learning by Imitation

We analyse technological progress when knowledge has a large tacit component so that transmission of knowledge takes place through direct personal imitation. It is shown that the rate of technological progress depends on the number of innovators in the same knowledge network. Assuming the diffusion of knowledge to mirror the geographical pattern of trade - the greater the trade between two sites, the greater the probability that technical knowledge flows between them - we show that a gradual expansion of trade causes a sudden rise in the rate of technological progress.

The published research paper: is it an important indicator of successful operational research at programme level?

Is a published research paper an important indicator of successful operational research at programme level in low-income countries? In academia, publishing in peer-reviewed scientific journals is highly encouraged and strongly pursued for academic recognition and career progression. In contrast, for those who engage in operational research at programme level, there is often no necessity or reward for publishing the results of research studies; it may even be criticized as being an unnecessary detraction from programme-related work. We present arguments to support publishing operational research from low-income countries; we highlight some of the main reasons for failure of publication at programme level and suggest ways forward