The SPIRIT collection: an overview of a large web collection

A large scale collection of web pages has been essential for research in information retrieval and related areas. This paper provides an overview of a large web collection used in the SPIRIT project for the design and testing of spatially-aware retrieval systems. Several statistics are derived and presented to show the characteristics of the collection

The text that reads itself

The idea of a text that ‘performs its own reading’ may not be entirely new, but it presents itself in a vivid new form, now supercharged by technology. Animated text, Kinetic Typography, Motion Graphics are all facets of the same technological package that has radically changed reading and readerships. This chapter explores the divide that is opening up between conventional reading and a new and enhanced form of reading that could be described as ‘hypertextual’. This digitally encountered and experienced form of reading has generated all kinds of possibilities, directions and redirections for the contemporary reader, which, it will be argued, has not only changed reading, but may be changing the way we think

Analyzing the Persistence of Referenced Web Resources with Memento

In this paper we present the results of a study into the persistence and availability of web resources referenced from papers in scholarly repositories. Two repositories with different characteristics, arXiv and the UNT digital library, are studied to determine if the nature of the repository, or of its content, has a bearing on the availability of the web resources cited by that content. Memento makes it possible to automate discovery of archived resources and to consider the time between the publication of the research and the archiving of the referenced URLs. This automation allows us to process more than 160000 URLs, the largest known such study, and the repository metadata allows consideration of the results by discipline. The results are startling: 45% (66096) of the URLs referenced from arXiv still exist, but are not preserved for future generations, and 28% of resources referenced by UNT papers have been lost. Moving forwards, we provide some initial recommendations, including that repositories should publish URL lists extracted from papers that could be used as seeds for web archiving systems.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Accepted to Open Repositories 2011 Conferenc

The Eurovision St Andrews collection of photographs

This report describes the Eurovision image collection compiled for the ImageCLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) evaluation exercise. The image collection consists of around 30,000 photographs from the collection provided by the University of St Andrews Library. The construction and composition of this unique image collection are described, together with the necessary information to obtain and use the image collection

Carbohydrate gel ingestion significantly improves the intermittent endurance capacity, but not sprint performance, of adolescent team games players during a simulated team games protocol

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of ingesting a carbohydrate (CHO) gel on the intermittent endurance capacity and sprint performance of adolescent team games players. Eleven participants [mean age 13.5 ± 0.7 years, height 1.72 ± 0.08 m, body mass (BM) 62.1 ± 9.4 kg] performed two trials separated by 3–7 days. In each trial, they completed four 15 min periods of part A of the Loughborough Intermittent Shuttle Test (LIST), followed by an intermittent run to exhaustion (part B). In the 5 min pre-exercise, participants consumed 0.818 mL kg−1 BM of a CHO or a non-CHO placebo gel, and a further 0.327 mL kg−1 BM every 15 min during part A of the LIST (38.0 ± 5.5 g CHO h−1 in the CHO trial). Intermittent endurance capacity was increased by 21.1% during part B when the CHO gel was ingested (4.6 ± 2.0 vs. 3.8 ± 2.4 min, P < 0.05, r = 0.67), with distance covered in part B significantly greater in the CHO trial (787 ± 319 vs. 669 ± 424 m, P < 0.05, r = 0.57). Gel ingestion did not significantly influence mean 15 m sprint time (P = 0.34), peak sprint time (P = 0.81), or heart rate (P = 0.66). Ingestion of a CHO gel significantly increases the intermittent endurance capacity of adolescent team games players during a simulated team games protocol

Reconnaissance study of ground-water levels and withdrawls in the vicinity of DeWitt and Piatt counties

"Prepared for the Mahomet Valley Water Authority.

Effective allocation and distribution of manpower: a feasibility study for the patrol section of the Collin County

Effective allocation and distribution of manpower: a feasibility study for the patrol section of the Collin County Sheriffs Office, McKinney, Texa

Word sense disambiguation and information retrieval

Starting with a review of previous research that attempted to improve the representation of documents in IR systems, this research is reassessed in the light of word sense ambiguity. It will be shown that a number of the attempts' successes or failures were due to the noticing or ignoring of ambiguity. In the review of disambiguation research, many varied techniques for performing automatic disambiguities are introduced. Research on the disambiguating abilities of people is presented also. It has been found that people are inconsistent when asked to disambiguate words and this causes problems when testing the output of an automatic disambiguator. The first of two sets of experiments to investigate the relationship between ambiguity, disambiguation, and IR, involves a technique where ambiguity and disambiguation can be simulated in a document collection. The results of these experiments lead to the conclusions that query size plays an important role in the relationship between ambiguity and IR. Retrievals based on very small queries suffer particularly from ambiguity and benefit most from disambiguation. Other queries, however, contain a sufficient number of words to provide a form of context that implicitly resolves the query word's ambiguities. In general, ambiguity is found to be not as great a problem to IR systems as might have been thought and the errors made by a disambiguator can be more of a problem than the ambiguity it is trying to resolve. In the complementary second set of experiments, a disambiguator is built and tested, it is applied to a document test collection, and an IR system is adjusted to accommodate the sense information in the collection. The conclusions of these experiments are found to broadly confirm those of the previous set