Web Based Semantic Communities – Who, How and Why We Might Want Them in the First Place

This paper describes an investigation undertaken as part of the FicNet Human-Computer Interaction project into the online amateur fiction community. By working with the community to determine current practices and areas of concern we consider how future technologies such as the semantic web might be used to design applications to support the community. As a first step in this process we gathered opinions both from members of the community and from those outside the community who had come into contact with it. Taking this information we consider the community as it is and what it might become

Freedom and Restraint: Tags, Vocabularies and Ontologies

The benefit of metadata is widely recognized. However, the nature of that information and the method of production remains a topic of some debate. This division is most noticeable between those who believe in ’free tagging’, and those who prefer the more formal construction of an ontology to define both the vocabulary of the domain and the relationships between the concepts within it. Looking at the community surrounding online amateur authors and the descriptive metadata they have developed over the last thirty years we consider what we can learn from a mature but amateur tagging community. This paper considers how these two systems might be used together to add the easy usability of free tagging to ontology descriptions and the conceptual richness of ontologies to free tags

Bringing Communities to the Semantic Web and the Semantic Web to Communities

In this paper we consider the types of community networks that are most often codified within the Semantic Web. We propose the recognition of a new structure which fulfils the definition of community used outside the SemanticWeb. We argue that the properties inherent in a community allow additional processing to be done with the described relationships existing between entities within the community network. Taking an existing online community as a case study we describe the ontologies and applications that we developed to support this community in the Semantic Web environment and discuss what lessons can be learnt from this exercise and applied in more general settings

At the Still Point of the Turning World

The history of landscape painting in the West has dictated and reiterated a phenomenological point-of-view derived from the Cartesian coordinate plane system. After having journeyed to northern India for eight months, I became influenced by other pictorial conceptions of space, namely the radial cosmological mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism and yantras of Hinduism. Unable to fully eliminate the coordinate plane system from the recess of my mind, I embarked upon a creative journey through consciousness in which my own studio practice provided the means to construct a new orientation, not only in terms of the perceivable, external world, but within the realm of my own embodied mind

National Survey of Professional Development on Writing Compliant Transition Individualized Education Programs

A national survey of special education administrators was conducted on current special education teacher trainings, the internal monitoring processes on transition IEPs, and the effect training has on compliance with federal law. In addition, this student researcher examined training and internal monitoring systems to determine if there were any similarities or differences between rural, suburban, and metropolitan school districts. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design gathered survey data from 147 special education administrators from across the U.S. and conducted interviews with 14 participants representing rural, suburban, and metropolitan school districts. When combining survey and interviews data, the results showed that less than 5 hrs of training was provided to secondary special education teachers on writing compliant transition IEPs per year. While results found that internal monitoring systems were in place in the majority of school districts, the fidelity of implementation is not consistent within or between school districts. The continuous improvement of trainings and writing transition IEPs was not found. Overall, the study found that rural, suburban, and metropolitan local education agencies (LEAs) have more similarities than differences in their professional development (PD) systems and internal monitoring systems and similar challenges impacting their school districts’ transition IEP compliance

America’s Diabetes Crisis: There is No Reason!

Many Americans are unaware of the diabetes crisis. Experts estimate that in the near future, a third of all adults in the United States will be diagnosed with diabetes. For diabetic patients, lack of management can swiftly lead to complications that can be life changing and even life threatening. Having a physician who can work closely with a patient to try different methods of medication and therapy can make the difference between the success and failure of a patient. Unfortunately, many people diagnosed with diabetes do not take their diagnosis seriously. A substantial percentage of diabetics cannot afford to manage their disease because of the cost of medical care and supplies. There is hope that with new inventions and research it will become easier to manage diabetes and hopefully one day there will be a cure. (137 words

"Let loose the dogs": Messiness and Ethical Wrangling in Toni Morrison\u27s Tar Baby

This paper metatextextually explores Toni Morrison’s 1981 Tar Baby and its female protagonist – a black model named Jadine Childs – by way of the text’s correlation with the Supermodel Phenomenon of the late 1970s and the early ’80s alongside social and political issues related to notions of post civil rights era racial arrival, success, and “selling out.” This argument draws a correlation between the experiences of the fictional Jadine and the internationally renowned supermodel Iman Abdulmajid whose career began in 1975. While this parallel is central to this essay’s execution, this article’s trajectory is informed and complicated by situating the character of Jadine in terms of historical research regarding the rise of the Supermodel Phenomenon and by way of reading the novel in the context of Black Pragmatism. Jadine confronts not only the tensions and expectation of the modeling world, but also the frictions between this professional realm and her black womanhood. These pressures are stressed in her relationships with her black radicalist lover, Son, her aunt Ondine, and the “woman in yellow” whom Jadine encounters in a Parisian supra market. By placing a black model in conversation with questions of authenticity and ancestry circulating in the post civil-rights era 1970’s and ‘80s America, Morrison leads her readers to question what it means to be truly “modern” or “fully integrated” and, contrarily, what it means to “sell out.” In its interrogation of racial arrival, this article suggests that this notion is not as definitive as Jadine has been taught to believe. Jadine’s final decision to pursue the possibility of a “fourth option” in Europe is, perhaps, a means of cultural re-approachment as opposed to a move toward “selling out.