Search Interfaces for Mathematicians

Access to mathematical knowledge has changed dramatically in recent years, therefore changing mathematical search practices. Our aim with this study is to scrutinize professional mathematicians' search behavior. With this understanding we want to be able to reason why mathematicians use which tool for what search problem in what phase of the search process. To gain these insights we conducted 24 repertory grid interviews with mathematically inclined people (ranging from senior professional mathematicians to non-mathematicians). From the interview data we elicited patterns for the user group "mathematicians" that can be applied when understanding design issues or creating new designs for mathematical search interfaces.Comment: conference article "CICM'14: International Conference on Computer Mathematics 2014", DML-Track: Digital Math Libraries 17 page

Entangled-Photon Generation from Parametric Down-Conversion in Media with Inhomogeneous Nonlinearity

We develop and experimentally verify a theory of Type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in media with inhomogeneous distributions of second-order nonlinearity. As a special case, we explore interference effects from SPDC generated in a cascade of two bulk crystals separated by an air gap. The polarization quantum-interference pattern is found to vary strongly with the spacing between the two crystals. This is found to be a cooperative effect due to two mechanisms: the chromatic dispersion of the medium separating the crystals and spatiotemporal effects which arise from the inclusion of transverse wave vectors. These effects provide two concomitant avenues for controlling the quantum state generated in SPDC. We expect these results to be of interest for the development of quantum technologies and the generation of SPDC in periodically varying nonlinear materials.Comment: submitted to Physical Review

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Reducing Architectural Knowledge Vaporization by Applying the Repertory Grid Technique

The architecture of a software-intensive system is the composition of architectural design decisions. These decisions are an important part of Architectural Knowledge (AK). Failure to document architectural design decisions can lead to AK vaporization and higher maintenance costs. To reduce AK vaporization, we propose to apply the Repertory Grid Technique (ROT) to make tacit knowledge about architecture decisions explicit. An architect can use the ROT to elicit decision alternatives and concerns, and to rank each alternative against concerns. To validate our approach, we conducted a survey with graduate students. In the survey, participants documented decisions using the RGT. We compared these decisions with decisions documented using a basic decision template. Our results suggest that RGT leads to less AK vaporization, compared to conventional ways of documenting decisions.</p

In Spite of Indeterminacy Many Common Factor Score Estimates Yield an Identical Reproduced Covariance Matrix

factor score estimates, regression component analysis, indeterminacy,

Nomenclature of Amphioboles: additions and revisions to the International Mineralogical Association's 1997 recommendations

The introduction of a fifth group of amphiboles, the Na–Ca–Mg–Fe–Mn–Li group, defined by 0.50 < B(Mg,Fe2+,Mn2+,Li) < 1.50 and 0.50 ≤ B(Ca,Na) ≤ 1.50 atoms per formula unit, with members whittakerite and ottoliniite, has been required by recent discoveries of B(Li,Na) amphiboles. These, and other new discoveries, such as sodicpedrizite (which is herein slightly, but significantly, changed from the original idealized formula), necessitate amendments to the IMA 1997 definitions of the Mg–Fe–Mn–Li, calcic, sodic-calcic and sodic groups. The discovery of obertiite and the finding of an incompatibility in the IMA 1997 subdivision of the sodic group require further amendments within the sodic group. All these changes, which have IMA approval, are summarized