Supporting Peer Help and Collaboration in Distributed Workplace Environments

Special Issue on Computer Supported Collaborative LearningIncreasingly, organizations are geographically distributed with activities coordinated and integrated through the use of information technology. Such organizations face constant change and the corresponding need for continual learning and renewal of their workers. In this paper we describe a prototype system called PHelpS (Peer Help System) that facilitates workers in carrying out such "life long learning". PHelpS supports workers as they perform their tasks, offers assistance in finding peer helpers when required, and mediates communication on task-related topics. When a worker runs into difficulty in carrying out a task, PHelpS provides a list of other workers who are ready, willing and able to help him or her. The worker then selects a particular helper with PHelpS supporting the subsequent help interaction. The PHelpS system acts as a facilitator to stimulate learning and collaboration, rather than as a directive agent imposing its perspectives on the workers. In this way PHelpS facilitates the creation of extensive informal peer help networks, where workers help one another with tasks and opens up new research avenues for further exploration of AI-based computer-supported collaborative learning. (http://aied.inf.ed.ac.uk/members98/archive/vol_9/greer/full.html

Barbarians at the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

A critical historiographical overview of art historical approaches to early medieval material culture, with a focus on the British Museum collections and their connections to religion

The seeds of divergence: the economy of French North America, 1688 to 1760

Generally, Canada has been ignored in the literature on the colonial origins of divergence with most of the attention going to the United States. Late nineteenth century estimates of income per capita show that Canada was relatively poorer than the United States and that within Canada, the French and Catholic population of Quebec was considerably poorer. Was this gap long standing? Some evidence has been advanced for earlier periods, but it is quite limited and not well-suited for comparison with other societies. This thesis aims to contribute both to Canadian economic history and to comparative work on inequality across nations during the early modern period. With the use of novel prices and wages from Quebec—which was then the largest settlement in Canada and under French rule—a price index, a series of real wages and a measurement of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are constructed. They are used to shed light both on the course of economic development until the French were defeated by the British in 1760 and on standards of living in that colony relative to the mother country, France, as well as the American colonies. The work is divided into three components. The first component relates to the construction of a price index. The absence of such an index has been a thorn in the side of Canadian historians as it has limited the ability of historians to obtain real values of wages, output and living standards. This index shows that prices did not follow any trend and remained at a stable level. However, there were episodes of wide swings—mostly due to wars and the monetary experiment of playing card money. The creation of this index lays the foundation of the next component. The second component constructs a standardized real wage series in the form of welfare ratios (a consumption basket divided by nominal wage rate multiplied by length of work year) to compare Canada with France, England and Colonial America. Two measures are derived. The first relies on a “bare bones” definition of consumption with a large share of land-intensive goods. This measure indicates that Canada was poorer than England and Colonial America and not appreciably richer than France. However, this measure overestimates the relative position of Canada to the Old World because of the strong presence of land-intensive goods. A second measure is created using a “respectable” definition of consumption in which the basket includes a larger share of manufactured goods and capital-intensive goods. This second basket better reflects differences in living standards since the abundance of land in Canada (and Colonial America) made it easy to achieve bare subsistence, but the scarcity of capital and skilled labor made the consumption of luxuries and manufactured goods (clothing, lighting, imported goods) highly expensive. With this measure, the advantage of New France over France evaporates and turns slightly negative. In comparison with Britain and Colonial America, the gap widens appreciably. This element is the most important for future research. By showing a reversal because of a shift to a different type of basket, it shows that Old World and New World comparisons are very sensitive to how we measure the cost of living. Furthermore, there are no sustained improvements in living standards over the period regardless of the measure used. Gaps in living standards observed later in the nineteenth century existed as far back as the seventeenth century. In a wider American perspective that includes the Spanish colonies, Canada fares better. The third component computes a new series for Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is to avoid problems associated with using real wages in the form of welfare ratios which assume a constant labor supply. This assumption is hard to defend in the case of Colonial Canada as there were many signs of increasing industriousness during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The GDP series suggest no long-run trend in living standards (from 1688 to circa 1765). The long peace era of 1713 to 1740 was marked by modest economic growth which offset a steady decline that had started in 1688, but by 1760 (as a result of constant warfare) living standards had sunk below their 1688 levels. These developments are accompanied by observations that suggest that other indicators of living standard declined. The flat-lining of incomes is accompanied by substantial increases in the amount of time worked, rising mortality and rising infant mortality. In addition, comparisons of incomes with the American colonies confirm the results obtained with wages— Canada was considerably poorer. At the end, a long conclusion is provides an exploratory discussion of why Canada would have diverged early on. In structural terms, it is argued that the French colony was plagued by the problem of a small population which prohibited the existence of scale effects. In combination with the fact that it was dispersed throughout the territory, the small population of New France limited the scope for specialization and economies of scale. However, this problem was in part created, and in part aggravated, by institutional factors like seigneurial tenure. The colonial origins of French America’s divergence from the rest of North America are thus partly institutional

An approach to the organization of knowledge for the modelling of conversation

Presented is a description of an approach to the modelling of conversation. It is suggested that to have any hope of succeeding at this endeavour, the problem must be tackled principally as a problem in pragmatics rather than as one in language analysis alone. Several pragmatic aspects of conversation are delineated and it is shown that the attempt to account for them raises a number of general issues in the representation of knowledge. A scheme for resolving some of these issues is constructed and given computational description as a set of (non-implemented) LISP-based control structures called |LISP. Central to this scheme are several different types of object that encode knowledge and communicate this knowledge by passing messages. One particular kind of object, the pattern expression (|PEXPR), turns out to be the most versatile. (|PEXPR) can encode an arbitrary amount of procedural or declarative information; are capable, as a by-product of their message passing behaviour of providing both a context for future processing decisions and a record of past processing decisions; and make contributions to the resolution of several artificial intelligence problems. A model of conversation is then proposed and some examples of typical conversations that might occur in the general context of attending a symphony concert are detailed in |LISP. It is suggested that conversation is goal oriented behaviour; and, in fact, the model is presented in terms of level of goal: from higher level non-linguistic goals through scripts directing both sides of a conversation, speech acts guiding one conversant's actions, and, finally, language level goals providing a basic parsing component for the model. In addition, a place is delineated for belief models of the conversants, necessary if utterances are to be properly understood or produced. The embedding of this kind of language model in a |LISP base yields a rich pragmatic environment for analyzing conversation.Science, Faculty ofComputer Science, Department ofGraduat

The Pedagogical Value of Papers: a Collaborative-Filtering based Paper Recommender

In this paper we discuss the pedagogical features necessary to make appropriate recommendations of papers to students in an e-learning domain. Analyzing data collected in a human subject study several characteristics of learners and of papers are found that are important to making good recommendations. These pedagogical features distinguish e-learning domains from many commercial domains where the only key factor is a user’s likes and dislikes

Granularity in Reverse Engineering

This paper has proposed a technique for program understanding using granularity-based recognition. The approach assumes program understanding is primarily a cognitive activity and proposes a human support system for facilitating such an activity. The mechanism is very general and we believe it has the potential for scalability, robustness, and flexibility