Releasing the Power of Digital Metadata: Examining Large Networks of Co-Related Publications

Bibliographic metadata plays a key role in scientific literature, not only to summarise and establish the facts of the publication record, but also to track citations between publications and hence to establish the impact of individual articles within the literature. Commercial secondary publishers have typically taken on the role of rekeying, mining and analysing this huge corpus of linked data, but as the primary literature has moved to the world of the digital repository, this task is now undertaken by new services such as Citeseer, Citebase or Google Scholar. As institutional and subject-based repositories proliferate and Open Access mandates increase, more of the literature will become openly available in well managed data islands containing a much greater amount of detailed bibliometric metadata in formats such as RDF. Through the use of efficient extraction and inference techniques, complex relations between data items can be established. In this paper we explain the importance of the co-relation in enabling new techniques to rate the impact of a paper or author within a large corpus of publications

Releasing the Power of Digital Metadata: Examining Large Networks of Co-Related Publications

Bibliographic metadata plays a key role in scientific literature, not only to summarise and establish the facts of the publication record, but also to track citations between publications and hence to establish the impact of individual articles within the literature. Commercial secondary publishers have typically taken on the role of rekeying, mining and analysing this huge corpus of linked data, but as the primary literature has moved to the world of the digital repository, this task is now undertaken by new services such as Citeseer, Citebase or Google Scholar. As institutional and subject-based repositories proliferate and Open Access mandates increase, more of the literature will become openly available in well managed data islands containing a much greater amount of detailed bibliometric metadata in formats such as RDF. Through the use of efficient extraction and inference techniques, complex relations between data items can be established. In this paper we explain the importance of the co-relation in enabling new techniques to rate the impact of a paper or author within a large corpus of publications

Experience of Dying: Concerns of Dying Patients and of Carers

Background: Terminally ill patients frequently express concerns about what dying will be like: how their bodies may change as disease progresses, how medication may alter the effect of these changes and whether and how their preferences will be respected as they become more ill.----- Methods: Thirty-six patients admitted to a hospice were interviewed and 18 carers of patients of the Palliative Care service,whohad died participated in focus groups. Thirty-three patients had advanced malignant disease, 13 were women; their mean age was 68 years (range 44–92 years).----- Results: The areas of concern consistently identified by patients were (i) privacy and autonomy, principally in regard to families, (ii) a lack of information about physical changes and medication use as death approached and (iii) the desire to shorten life, which was expressed by all patients. Carers recalled problems accessing services and support and had needed more help with practical issues such as medication timing and dose. They believed that not enough information about the patients’ illnesses had been given to them and they were insistent that carers should have information against the wishes of patients.----- Conclusion: Some of the patients’ and carers’ concerns can be readily addressed. Others, particularly access to confidential information, cannot be addressed without a realignment of professional ethical standards and community expectations. The patients’ discussions of their desire to shorten life may have implications for the debate on euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide

Paying for Care Costs in Later Life Using the Value in People’s Homes

With the number of U.K. citizens aged 75+ doubling to 10 million by 2040, and with 1.3 million people already receiving social care services in England alone, social care funding is a key public policy challenge. The government has launched a set of reforms designed to get social care funding onto a sustainable footing by establishing a new level for what individuals and the state will pay. The reforms are designed to encourage individuals to explore how best to use their available wealth and assets to meet care costs through a mixed system of local authority and private sector care-funding options. One option is to use the value in the home to bridge the cost between out-of-pocket costs and care home fees. In this article, we consider two new financial arrangements designed to meet the needs of people in different financial circumstances based on releasing equity from the home. These are an equity-backed insurance product and an “equity bank” that lets a person draw down an income from their hom

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Pedagogical memory and the space of the postcolonial classroom : reading Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions

This article addresses issues of the mnemonic space of the literature classroom by interrogating a classic text of African women’s writing, Tsitsi Dangaremnga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) for the ways it speaks about education in 1960s and 1970s late-colonial Rhodesia. The article suggests that the novel reviews and critiques a number of memorial strategies that were crucial to the colonial educational system, thereby facilitating a reflexive application of the novel’s concerns to the contexts in which it is often taught, that of today’s postcolonial classrooms. The article seeks to place Dangarembga’s novel in the context of its present moment, contemporary South Africa – that of the present critic’s site of practice, both pedagogical and scholarly, and that of many of this article’s readers. This present moment, in turn, is made up the many sites, successive and simultaneous, in which the novel’s work of memory is being re-activated in the minds of students as readers and writers. Via a dialogue between the textual past and the pedagogical present, one which is often subject to critical amnesia, the article seeks to inaugurate a debate on the nature of pedagogical memory in the space of the postcolonial university or high school literature classroom.http://www.informaworld.com/RSCRhb2013gv201

Out of the square into reality

In an attempt to increase the real world practicality of mathematics and science within secondary schools, five Brisbane secondary schools, a leading Queensland University, private industry and government agencies joined together in collaborative and dynamic partnership to embark on the project – “Out of the Square and into Reality”. The project is focussed on changing the perception and pedagogy of mathematics and science and improving higher order thinking. It also aims to provide positive role models for students in secondary schools, and attract higher quality students to tertiary engineering, science and mathematics pathways. The project will challenge traditional student perceptions that mathematics and science are “old fashioned and alienating”, based solely on facts, and irrelevant to the real world. To achieve this, the project will make connections between the school subjects of Physics, Engineering Technology, Design Technology and Mathematics A, B and C, and the professional disciplines of industrial design, aeronautics and civil, mechanical and electrical engineering. Multi-disciplinary hands-on activity kits containing extension exercises, assignments and exam questions will be developed according to current senior syllabi and common curriculum elements. Practising professionals will have input to improve student interest, learning outcomes, innovation and ability to think outside the square. Students will make direct connections between the activities and what they learn in the classroom to construct new and improved knowledge. Constructivist teaching methods and enhanced student engagement will aim to deliver improved student learning outcomes in mathematics and science. Through having the opportunity to work with tertiary educators and industry professionals, benefits for teachers should include improved teaching approaches and techniques. Teachers will also acquire resources that will positively influence all students, including those outside the project. This paper reports on the project development and the initial stages of progress in creating the first two activity kits

Education, multiculturalism and the market : A perspective on developments in Australia

This paper argues that a number of competing interpretations of multicu1turalism and education have emerged during the 1980s and 1990s in response to issues ofethnic and cultural difference in Australia. Drawing on the work of otherresearchers such as Kalantzis et al. (1990), the article traces the changing nature of governmental discourses and their effects in the education field, from cultural pluralist models through to perspectives which stressed broad institutional change and the social in clusion of marginalised 'ethnic minority' groups. The paper extends previous work by examining the ways in which the language of neo-liberalism has displaced the categories of race, ethnicity and culture as key concerns in the development of educational policy and programs by the end of the 1990s. It suggests, that these new trends have transformed multiculturalismin education into a 'choice' of establishing separate schools and systems along ethno-specific lines, but with no guarantee of improving educational outcomes. Concluding, the piece argues that an alternative agenda would build on the insights gained in the earlier processes of reform, which focused on broad institutionaI change. However, it is also proposed that there is a need to linkt hese insights to a critical analysis of the ways in which the emerging types of knowledge, institutionaI arrangements and teaching strategies are producing new forms of exclusion within the ethnic and culturai spheres of our 'Iife-worlds'