1,390 research outputs found
Relation Discovery from Web Data for Competency Management
This paper describes a technique for automatically discovering associations between people and expertise from an analysis of very large data sources (including web pages, blogs and emails), using a family of algorithms that perform accurate named-entity recognition, assign different weights to terms according to an analysis of document structure, and access distances between terms in a document. My contribution is to add a social networking approach called BuddyFinder which relies on associations within a large enterprise-wide "buddy list" to help delimit the search space and also to provide a form of 'social triangulation' whereby the system can discover documents from your colleagues that contain pertinent information about you. This work has been influential in the information retrieval community generally, as it is the basis of a landmark system that achieved overall first place in every category in the Enterprise Search Track of TREC2006
Can constitutions improve democracy? Sometimes, but not always
Does adopting a constitution lead to better democracy? Not necessarily, write Todd A. Eisenstadt, A Carl LeVan, and Tofigh Maboudi, who studied 138 constitutions from a 37 year-period. They find that in many countries, the constitution-making processes did not incorporate broad public consultation, meaning that the drafters were often able to grab power by codifying benefits for themselves and for their supporters
Constitutionalism and Democracy Dataset, Version 1.0
The main objective of the CDD is to quantify the process of constitution-making since 1974. This is the first public release of any data on the process of constitution-making. This release includes data on 144 national constitutions promulgated in 119 countries from 1974 to 2014. The unit of analysis in the data is national constitutions. The data in this release includes only ânewâ constitutions and does not include suspended, re-installed, amended, or interim constitutions. In this release, only countries with a population larger than 500,000 are included. The authors intend to update the data by including all countries, expanding the time frame, and adding new variables which record the process of constitution-making
Sociology and postcolonialism: another 'missing' revolution?
Sociology is usually represented as having emerged alongside European modernity. The latter is frequently understood as sociology's special object with sociology itself a distinctively modern form of explanation. The period of sociology's disciplinary formation was also the heyday of European colonialism, yet the colonial relationship did not figure in the development of sociological understandings. While the recent emergence of postcolonialism appears to have initiated a reconsideration of understandings of modernity, with the development of theories of multiple modernities, I suggest that this engagement is more an attempt at recuperating the transformative aspect of postcolonialism than engaging with its critiques. In setting out the challenge of postcolonialism to dominant sociological accounts, I also address `missing feminist/queer revolutions', suggesting that by engaging with postcolonialism there is the potential to transform sociological understandings by opening up a dialogue beyond the simple pluralism of identity claims
Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning
The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning
Designing multiplayer games to facilitate emergent social behaviours online
This paper discusses an exploratory case study of the design of games that facilitate spontaneous social interaction and group behaviours among distributed individuals, based largely on symbolic presence 'state' changes. We present the principles guiding the design of our game environment: presence as a symbolic phenomenon, the importance of good visualization and the potential for spontaneous self-organization among groups of people. Our game environment, comprising a family of multiplayer 'bumper-car' style games, is described, followed by a discussion of lessons learned from observing users of the environment. Finally, we reconsider and extend our design principles in light of our observations
The roots of "Western European societal evolution". A concept of Europe by JenĆ SzƱcs
JenĆ SzƱcs wrote his essay entitled Sketch on the three regions of Europe in the early 1980s in Hungary. During these years, a historically well-argued opinion emphasising a substantial difference between Central European and Eastern European societies was warmly received in various circles of the political opposition. In a wider European perspective SzƱcs used the old âliberty toposâ which claims that the history of Europe is no other than the fulfillment of liberty. In his Sketch, SzƱcs does not only concentrate on questions concerning the Middle Ages in Western Europe. Yet it is this stream of thought which brought a new perspective to explaining European history. His picture of the Middle Ages represents well that there is a way to integrate all typical Western motifs of post-war self-definition into a single theory. Mainly, the âliberty motifâ, as a sign of âEuropeanismâ â in the interpretation of BibĂłâs concept, Anglo-saxon Marxists and Weberâs social theory â, developed from medieval concepts of state and society and from an analysis of economic and social structures. SzƱcsâs historical aspect was a typical intellectual product of the 1980s: this was the time when a few Central European historians started to outline non-Marxist aspects of social theory and categories of modernisation theories, but concealing them with Marxist terminology
Cosmological Multi-Black Hole Solutions
We present simple, analytic solutions to the Einstein-Maxwell equation, which
describe an arbitrary number of charged black holes in a spacetime with
positive cosmological constant . In the limit , these
solutions reduce to the well known Majumdar-Papapetrou (MP) solutions. Like the
MP solutions, each black hole in a solution has charge equal
to its mass , up to a possible overall sign. Unlike the limit,
however, solutions with are highly dynamical. The black holes move
with respect to one another, following natural trajectories in the background
deSitter spacetime. Black holes moving apart eventually go out of causal
contact. Black holes on approaching trajectories ultimately merge. To our
knowledge, these solutions give the first analytic description of coalescing
black holes. Likewise, the thermodynamics of the solutions is
quite interesting. Taken individually, a black hole is in thermal
equilibrium with the background deSitter Hawking radiation. With more than one
black hole, because the solutions are not static, no global equilibrium
temperature can be defined. In appropriate limits, however, when the black
holes are either close together or far apart, approximate equilibrium states
are established.Comment: 15 pages (phyzzx), UMHEP-380 (minor referencing error corrected
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