The Fascinator - Desktop eResearch and Flexible Portals

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersThe Fascinator is an Apache Solr front end to the Fedora commons repository. This project was originally funded by ARROW, as part of the mini project scheme. The Fascinator is written in Java. It drops into the Tomcat server that comes with Fedora. There are two ways this software can be used. It can be used as a server to deliver one or more portals with faceted searching and browsing or as an (experimental) desktop tool for managing eResearch assets and synchronising them with other repositories.ARROW project; Monash Universit

ICE-TheOREM - End to End Semantically Aware eResearch Infrastructure for Theses

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 10:00 AM – 11:30 AMICE-TheOREM was a project which made several important contributions to the repository domain, promoting deposit by integrating the repository with authoring workflows and enhancing open access, by adding new infrastructure to allow fine-grained embargo management within an institution without impacting on existing open access repository infrastructure. In the area of scholarly communications workflows, the project produced a complete end-to-end demonstration of eScholarship for word processor users, with tools for authoring, managing and disseminating semantically-rich thesis documents fully integrated with supporting data. This work is focused on theses, as it is well understood that early career researchers are the most likely to lead the charge in new innovations in scholarly publishing and dissemination models. The authoring tools are built on the ICE content management system, which allows authors to work within a word processing system (as most authors do) with easy-to-use toolbars to structure and format their documents. The ICE system manages both small data files and links to larger data sets. The result is research publication which are available not just as paper-ready PDF files but as fully interactive semantically aware web documents which can be disseminated via repository software such as ePrints, DSpace and Fedora as complete supported web-native One the technological side, ICE-TheOREM implemented the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) protocol to integrate between a content management system, a thesis management system and multiple repository software packages and looked at ways to describe aggregate objects which include both data and documents, which can be generalized to domains other than chemistry. ICE-TheOREM has demonstrated how focusing on the use of the web architecture (including ORE) enables repository functions to be distributed between systems for complex, data-rich compound objects.UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC

The Fascinator: A lightweight, modular contribution to the Fedora-commons world

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Fedora User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-20 01:30 PM – 03:00 PMThe Australian government has supported the development of repository infrastructure for several years now. One product of this support was the ARROW project (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World). The ARROW project sponsored a hybrid commercial/open-source approach to building vendor-supported repository infrastructure with open-source underpinnings. One of the open-source contributions, which complements the vendor-sourced product adopted by many of the ARROW partners is a simple to install and configure front-end web service for Fedora repositories known as "The Fascinator". The Fascinator was conceived initially as a way to prove a point in an ongoing dialogue within the ARROW project about repository architecture. The goal was to test the hypothesis that it would be possible to build a useful, fast, flexible web front end for a repository using a single fast indexing system to handle browsing via facets, full-text search, multiple 'portal' views of subsets of a large corpus, and most importantly, easy-to administer security that could handle the most common uses cases seen in the ARROW community. This contrasted with the approach taken by ARROW's commercial partner, which used several different indices to achieve only some of the same functionality in an environment which was much more complex to manage and configure. We will give an overview of the product in both functional and technical terms. Functionally, The Fascinator offers: Click-to-create portals. Easy to configure security based on a query-based filter system, the repository owner can express security in terms of saved-searches that define what a user or group is allowed to see. Highly flexible indexing of a Fedora repository for administrators (and by extension anything the harvesting module can scrape-up). Technically, The Fascinator is a modular system, written in Java so it is easy to deploy with Fedora and Solr, consisting of: An indexing system for Fedora which builds on the standard G-Search supplied with the software, and some work done by the Muradora team. A configurable harvesting application which can ingest data from OAI-PMH, ORE, and local file systems. A web portal application which can be used to build flexible front end websites or act as a service to other sites via an HTTP API. An OAI-PMH (and ATOM archive) system which can create sub-feeds from a repository very easily without complexities like OAI-PMH sets. An easy to use installer for Unix based platforms allowing a systems administrator to install the application along with Fedora and Solr with a few keystrokes. While The Fascinator's goals were modest it has been met with some enthusiasm by repository managers in Australia and beyond, and is being trialled and/or piloted in a small number of sites across the world.ARROW project, Monash Universit

Why Announce Leadership Contributions? An Experimental Study of the Signaling and Reciprocity Hypotheses

Why do fundraisers announce initial contributions to their charity?Potential explanations are that these announcements cause future donors to increase their contributions, either because they want to reciprocate the generosity of earlier donors, or because the initial contributions are seen as a signal of the charity's quality.Using experimental methods we investigate these two hypotheses.When only the first donor is informed of the public good's quality, subjects not only copy the initial contribution, but the first donor also correctly anticipates this response.While this result is consistent with both the signaling and the reciprocity explanations, the latter is unlikely to be the driving force.The reason is that announcements have no effect on contribution levels when the quality of the public good is common knowledge.Thus our results provide strong support for the signaling hypothesis.funds;information;public goods

The Effect of Rewards and Sanctions in Provision of Public Goods

A growing number of field and experimental studies focus on the institutional arrangements by which individuals are able to solve collective action problems. Important in this research is the role of reciprocity and institutions that facilitate cooperation via opportunities for monitoring, sanctioning, and rewarding others. Sanctions represent a cost to both the participant imposing the sanction and the individual receiving the sanction. Rewards represent a zero sum transfer from participants giving to those receiving rewards. We contrast reward and sanction institutions in regard to their impact on cooperation and efficiency in the context of a public goods experiment.

No Contest: Defended Divorce in England & Wales

This is the final version of the report. Available from Nuffield Foundation via the link in this record.This report explores the relatively rare phenomenon of the ‘contested’ or ‘defended’ divorce in England & Wales. Contested divorce refers to cases where the respondent objects to the divorce on the basis that the marriage has not broken down and/or objects to the reasons given for the divorce. In about 600 cases each year - fewer than 1% of all divorces – the respondent will file an Answer to formally defend the divorce. The report is the first study of defended divorce since the 1980s. It sets out to explore why people do (and do not) defend divorce proceedings, how the court responds to these cases, and who appears to win what, if anything, as a result. The report also addresses two policy questions: whether the substantive law on divorce should be reformed to remove fault and, if reform were to occur, whether defence should still be possible or whether divorce could be safely and appropriately a purely administrative process. The report is based on court file analysis of 100 intend to defend (ITD) cases, a sample of 71 cases with Answers (including 29 of the ITD cases) and a comparison group of 300 undefended cases. This is supplemented by interviews and focus groups with petitioners and respondents, family lawyers and judges. No Contest? is a companion study to the previously published Finding Fault? report that examined undefended divorce cases. The Finding Fault report highlighted the gap between how the law works in theory and the pragmatic way it works in practice in undefended divorce cases. In the absence of law reform, the family justice system has developed something tantamount to immediate unilateral divorce ‘on demand’. Divorce is, in effect, already an administrative process that is masked by an often painful, and sometimes destructive, legal ritual with no obvious benefits for the parties or the state. The Finding Fault? report recommended reforming the law to remove fault entirely.Nuffield Foundatio

Why Announce Leadership Contributions? An Experimental Study of the Signaling and Reciprocity Hypotheses

Why do fundraisers announce initial contributions to their charity?Potential explanations are that these announcements cause future donors to increase their contributions, either because they want to reciprocate the generosity of earlier donors, or because the initial contributions are seen as a signal of the charity's quality.Using experimental methods we investigate these two hypotheses.When only the first donor is informed of the public good's quality, subjects not only copy the initial contribution, but the first donor also correctly anticipates this response.While this result is consistent with both the signaling and the reciprocity explanations, the latter is unlikely to be the driving force.The reason is that announcements have no effect on contribution levels when the quality of the public good is common knowledge.Thus our results provide strong support for the signaling hypothesis.

Linda Cabral and Laura Sefton on So Many to Choose from: How to Select Organizations for a Site Visit

Blog post to AEA365, a blog sponsored by the American Evaluation Association (AEA) dedicated to highlighting Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources, and Lessons Learned for evaluators. The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association of evaluators devoted to the application and exploration of program evaluation, personnel evaluation, technology, and many other forms of evaluation. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products, and organizations to improve their effectiveness