PageRank: Standing on the shoulders of giants

PageRank is a Web page ranking technique that has been a fundamental ingredient in the development and success of the Google search engine. The method is still one of the many signals that Google uses to determine which pages are most important. The main idea behind PageRank is to determine the importance of a Web page in terms of the importance assigned to the pages hyperlinking to it. In fact, this thesis is not new, and has been previously successfully exploited in different contexts. We review the PageRank method and link it to some renowned previous techniques that we have found in the fields of Web information retrieval, bibliometrics, sociometry, and econometrics

‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’: diversity and scholarship in Intelligence Studies

This study takes stock of the field of Intelligence Studies thanks to a quantitative review of all the articles published in the two main journals in the field: Intelligence and National Security and the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. Particular attention is paid to the diversity of the authors publishing in these two journals and the evolution of the issues they discuss. Publications in the field are widely authored by males based in the United States and the United Kingdom who write about Western intelligence and security organizations. Recent years have seen a slight diversification in the field but further efforts will be necessary to develop a more eclectic body of researchers and research on intelligence and national security

Standing on the shoulders of giants? Anthropology and the city

It has become increasingly commonplace to note that the past decade has witnessed a proliferation of anthropological studies dealing holistically with the dynamics of cities and city-living, to the extent that the current moment is considered to represent something of an epistemological ‘flourishing’ within anthropology, particularly in relation to the benchmark of the discipline’s historical urban mainstay, the neighbourhood ethnography. Studies explicitly offering a window onto the broader nature of urban contexts are not necessarily new, however, and indeed, were arguably the basis upon which urban anthropology originally emerged as an identifiable sub-discipline before subsequently taking a more particularistic turn. This article offers a re-appraisal of the origins and evolution of holistic urban anthropological approaches, explaining how, why, and in what context these coalesced during the first quarter of the 20th century, as well as offering an explanation for the ensuing rise of more parochial approaches to city life. It does so based on an alternative intellectual history of the famous Chicago School of Sociology (CSS), in particular highlighting the epistemological debt contemporary anthropological studies implicitly owe to the CSS, as well as the enduring lessons that the urban studies it inspired potentially continue to offer for anthropology

Pluripotent human stem cells: Standing on the shoulders of giants

The advent of human pluripotent stem cells, with the first derivation of human embryonic stem cells in 1998, and of human induced pluripotent stem cells in 2007, has ushered in an era of considerable excitement about the prospects of using these cells to develop new opportunities for healthcare, from their potential for regenerative medicine to their use as tools for studying the cellular basis of many diseases and the discovery of new drugs. But as with the flowering of many new areas in science, the biology of human pluripotent stem cells has its roots in a long history of, sometimes, less fêted research. In a period when research funding is frequently driven by a desire to meet specific clinical or economic goals, it is salutary to remember that the opportunities offered by human pluripotent stem cells have their origins in curiosity driven research without any of those goals in mind. In this case, that research focused on the relatively rare gonadal cancers known as teratomas, tumors that have fascinated people since antiquity because their sometime grotesque manifestations with haphazard collections of tissues and sometimes recognizable body parts. Although well known to clinical pathologists it was the pioneering work of Leroy Stevens, who first discovered that teratomas occur at a significant rate in the 129 strain of the laboratory mouse and could be produced experimentally, that laid the foundations for our understanding of the biology of these tumors and the central role of the embryonal carcinoma cell, one of the archetypal tumor stem cells

Standing on the shoulders of Scandinavian giants?

Das Werk „Demonstratio“ („Beweis, dass die Sprache der Ungarn und Lappen dieselbe ist“) des ungarischen Jesuiten Joannes (János) Sajnovics ist ein Klassiker der finno-ugrischen Sprachwissenschaft. Sajnovics war ein Astronom ohne Erfahrung in vergleichenden Sprachstudien, als er in den Jahren 1768–69 an einer astronomischen Expedition in der Finnmark teilnahm. Erst als er in Nordnorwegen ankam, begann er scheinbar unvorbereitet mit seiner Untersuchung. Im Winter 1769/70 war er in Kopenhagen. Während dieses Aufenthalts hatte Sajnovics Kontakt zu Mitgliedern der Königlich Dänischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, wo er seine Theorie vorstellte. Seine bahnbrechende „Demonstratio“ wurde in zwei Ausgaben gedruckt, die erste 1770 in Kopenhagen und die nächste im folgenden Jahr in Trnava. Eine genaue Lektüre der ersten Ausgabe zeigt, dass die innovative Methodik von Sajnovics fast ausschließlich auf skandinavischer Forschungsliteratur basierte. Hinweise auf mitteleuropäische Gelehrte und ihre Theorien durchziehen die zweite überarbeitete Auflage der Demonstratio, die jedoch erst nach der Rückkehr von Sajnovics und seinem Mentor Maximilian Hell in das Habsburgerreich gemacht wurde

REL: An Entity Linker Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Entity linking is a standard component in modern retrieval system that is often performed by third-party toolkits. Despite the plethora of open source options, it is difficult to find a single system that has a modular architecture where certain components may be replaced, does not depend on external sources, can easily be updated to newer Wikipedia versions, and, most important of all, has state-of-the-art performance. The REL system presented in this paper aims to fill that gap. Building on state-of-the-art neural components from natural language processing research, it is provided as a Python package as well as a web API. We also report on an experimental comparison against both well-established systems and the current state-of-the-art on standard entity linking benchmarks