Minding our ps and qs: Issues of property, provenance, quantity and quality in institutional repositories

The development of institutional repositories has opened the path to the mass availability of peer-reviewed scholarly information and the extension of information democracy to the academic domain. A secondary space of free-to-all documents has begun to parallel the hitherto-closed world of journal publishing and many publishers have consented to the inclusion of copyrighted documents in digital repositories, although frequently specifying that a version other than the formally-published one be used. This paper will conceptually examine the complex interplay of rights, permissions and versions between publishers and repositories, focussing on the New Zealand situation and the challenges faced by university repositories in recruiting high-quality peer-reviewed documents for the open access domain. A brief statistical snapshot of the appearance of material from significant publishers in repositories will be used to gauge the progress that has been made towards broadening information availability. The paper will also look at the importance of harvesting and dissemination, in particular the role of Google Scholar in bringing research information within reach of ordinary internet users. The importance of accuracy, authority, provenance and transparency in the presentation of research-based information and the important role that librarians can and should play in optimising the open research discovery experience will be emphasised

Sythetic Securitization: A Comment on Bell & Dawson

The topic studied in this thesis is the right of public access as a legal institution. In that connection, several questions which are different from each other are raised. The thesis focuses to a great extent on the interaction between questions of a practical-legal nature and those whose character is more connected to legal theory. The point of departure of the discussion in the thesis is that some of the legal norms that are incorporated in the institution of the right of public access are customary law. Thus, the concept customary law is particularly considered, and the question of in what way the customary law can be filled with content raises special interest. A hypothesis is put forward in the thesis, which is that the right of public access constitutes part of those regulations whose purpose is that land should be used appropriately - seen from the societal perspective that land is a limited natural resource which should be used expediently, for the husbanding of resources. What is advocated in this thesis, is that in both the jurisprudential discussion about the right of public access and in the argumentation that is conducted in the practical legal application, the three subjects, the Actual User, the Canalizer and the Actual User in the Collective and their different use of the land, are separated. Further, it is advocated that the discussion as to which activities are allowed by the right of public access should be based on a consciousness that the activities can concern “everyday use” or “recreation” and that, depending on whether the activities are considered to concern the one or the other, different conclusions regarding the permissibility of the activities will be drawn. Furthermore, it is shown in the thesis that in conflicts between different means of using land, the courts seem to presume that all land is covered by the right of public access - a presumption that does not hold if the land is a part of somebody’s zone of home privacy, is needed for certain business or constitute biologically sensitive land.I denna avhandling studeras allemansrätten som rättsinstitut. Därvid aktualiseras flera sinsemellan olikartade frågeställningar. Avhandlingen fokuserar i stor utsträckning på samspelet mellan frågor av praktisk-juridiskt slag och sådana av mer rättsteoretiskt slag. Diskussionen i avhandlingen utgår från att vissa av de i institutet allemansrätten ingående rättsliga normerna är sedvanerätt. Därför diskuteras sedvanerättsbegreppet särskilt, varvid frågan hur sedvanerätt kan fyllas med ett innehåll väcker särskilt intresse. I avhandlingen uppställs en hypotes om att allemansrätten är en del av en reglering syftande till lämplig markanvändning - sett ur den samhälleliga synvinkeln att mark är en begränsad naturresurs som bör nyttjas ändamålsenligt, för hushållning med resurser. I avhandlingen förespråkas att man i såväl den rättsvetenskapliga diskussionen om allemansrätten, som i den argumentation som förs i den praktiska rättstillämpningen, särskiljer de tre subjekten utövaren, kanalisatören och utövaren i kollektivet och deras skilda nyttjande. Vidare förespråkas att diskussionen, om vilka aktiviteter som är allemansrättsligt tillåtna, sker utifrån en medvetenhet om att aktiviteterna kan avse ”vardagsnytta” eller ”rekreation” och att, beroende av om aktiviteterna antas avse det ena eller det andra, olika slutsatser angående aktiviteternas tillåtlighet kommer att dras. Därtill visas i avhandlingen att domstolen, i konflikter mellan olika sätt att nyttja marken, tycks presumera att all mark är allemansrättsligt tillgänglig - en presumtion som bryts om marken ingår i någons hemfridszon, behövs för vissa näringar eller utgör biologiskt känslig mark

Robust Statistics

In lieu of an abstract, here is the entry\u27s first paragraph: Robust statistics are procedures that maintain nominal Type I error rates and statistical power in the presence of violations of the assumptions that underpin parametric inferential statistics. Since George Box coined the term in 1953, research on robust statistics has centered on the assumption of normality, although the violation of other parametric assumptions (e.g., homogeneity of variance) has their own implications for the accuracy of parametric procedures. This entry looks at the importance of robust statistics in educational and social science research and explains the robustness argument. It then describes robust descriptive statistics, their inferential extensions, and two common resampling procedures that are robust alternatives to classic parametric methods

Discussion of "Feature Matching in Time Series Modeling" by Y. Xia and H. Tong

Discussion of "Feature Matching in Time Series Modeling" by Y. Xia and H. Tong [arXiv:1104.3073]Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-STS345A the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Jacob Mincer's Contribution to Modern Labor Economics: A Review Essay

One of the key figures in the development of modern labor economics is Jacob Mincer (1922- 2006). His contributions have recently been highlighted and assessed in two books. The most indepth and substantive of these volumes is by Portuguese economist Pedro Teixeira, entitled Jacob Mincer: A Founding Father of Modern Labor Economics (2007). Also valuable and well done is an edited volume by Shoshana Grossbard, Jacob Mincer: A Pioneer of Modern Labor Economics (2006). It is composed of a number of short remembrances by Mincer's colleagues and students, an oral history interview with Mincer by Teixeira, several larger review chapters on important parts of Mincer's research program, and several speeches and short articles by Mincer. In this review essay I provide a brief summary and evaluation of Mincer's research contributions and place in the history of thought in labor economics, drawing largely on these two books but with some of my own observations and perspectives interspersed. Working Paper 08-2

Winsorizing

In lieu of an abstract, here is the entry\u27s first paragraph: Winsorizing is a procedure that moderates the influence of outliers on the mean and variance and thereby creates more robust estimators of location and variability. The procedure is named for biostatistician Charles P. Winsor. Parametric inferential procedures that rely on the mean and variance (e.g., t test) become more robust when they incorporate Winsorized estimators. Winsorizing is an important tool for educational and social science researchers for two reasons. First, significance tests based on the mean and variance are very common procedures for significance testing in the social sciences. Second, surveys of the educational and psychological literature show that nonnormally distributed data are the rule rather than the exception, and even modest departures from normality disproportionately affect the mean and variance compared with other more robust estimators of location (e.g., median) and variability (e.g., median absolute deviation

The Core Principle and Fundamental Theorem of Industrial Relations

This paper describes the original paradigm of industrial relations, as developed in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. The original paradigm had three faces: science-building, problem-solving, and ethical/ideological. It is argued that the core principle that spans and unites these three faces is rejection of the orthodox economic model of a competitive labour market. This proposition may also be stated as rejection of the proposition that labour is a commodity. Building on this core principle is the fundamental theorem of industrial relations. It states that a free market capitalist economic system cannot survive and efficiently perform without the practices and institutions of industrial relations that humanize, stabilize, professionalize, democratize and balance the employment relationship. Working Paper 07-0