An analysis of ranking principles and retrieval strategies

The assumptions underlying the Probability Ranking Principle (PRP) have led to a number of alternative approaches that cater or compensate for the PRP’s limitations. All alternatives deviate from the PRP by incorporating dependencies. This results in a re-ranking that promotes or demotes documents depending upon their relationship with the documents that have been already ranked. In this paper, we compare and contrast the behaviour of state-of-the-art ranking strategies and principles. To do so, we tease out analytical relationships between the ranking approaches and we investigate the document kinematics to visualise the effects of the different approaches on document ranking.

When two is better than one : a study of ranking paradigms and their integrations for subtopic retrieval

In this paper, we consider the problem of document ranking in a non-traditional retrieval task, called subtopic retrieval. This task involves promoting relevant documents that cover many subtopics of a query at early ranks, providing thus diversity within the ranking. In the past years, several approaches have been proposed to diversify retrieval results. These approaches can be classified into two main paradigms, depending upon how the ranks of documents are revised for promoting diversity. In the first approach subtopic diversification is achieved implicitly, by choosing documents that are different from each other, while in the second approach this is done explicitly, by estimating the subtopics covered by documents. Within this context, we compare methods belonging to the two paradigms. Furthermore, we investigate possible strategies for integrating the two paradigms with the aim of formulating a new ranking method for subtopic retrieval. We conduct a number of experiments to empirically validate and contrast the state-of-the-art approaches as well as instantiations of our integration approach. The results show that the integration approach outperforms state-of-the-art strategies with respect to a number of measures.

Integrating understandability in the evaluation of consumer health search engines

In this paper we propose a method that integrates the no- tion of understandability, as a factor of document relevance, into the evaluation of information retrieval systems for con- sumer health search. We consider the gain-discount evaluation framework (RBP, nDCG, ERR) and propose two understandability-based variants (uRBP) of rank biased precision, characterised by an estimation of understandability based on document readability and by different models of how readability influences user understanding of document content. The proposed uRBP measures are empirically contrasted to RBP by comparing system rankings obtained with each measure. The findings suggest that considering understandability along with topicality in the evaluation of in- formation retrieval systems lead to different claims about systems effectiveness than considering topicality alone.

Research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability : International Perspectives and Provocations

Sustainability is a global issue that urgently needs addressing, the most serious consequences of which concern children and future generations. This insightful research text tackles one of the most significant contemporary issues of our times – the nexus between society and environment – and how early childhood education can contribute to sustainable living. By offering international and multidisciplinary research perspectives on Early Childhood Education for Sustainability, each chapter explores and investigates the complex topic of sustainability and its relationship to early childhood education. A particular emphasis that runs through this text is young children as empowered citizens, capable of both contributing to and creating change for sustainability. The chapter authors work from, or are aligned with, a transformative education paradigm that suggests the socio-constructivist frameworks currently underpinning Early Childhood Education require reframing in light of the social transformations necessary to address humanity’s unsustainable, unjust and unhealthy living patterns. This research text is designed to be provocative and challenging; in so doing it seeks to encourage exploration of current understandings about Early Childhood Education for Sustainability, offers new dimensions for more deeply informed practice, and proposes avenues for further research in this field.

Feminism and Global Justice

This book attempts to persuade a new generation of scholars, criminologists, activists, and policy makers sympathetic to the quest for global justice to open the envelope, to step out of their comfort zones and typical frames of analysis to gaze at a world full of injustice against the female sex, much of it systemic, linked to culture, custom and religion. In some instances the sources of these injustices intersect with those that produce global inequality, imperialism and racism. This book also investigates circumstances where the globalising forces cultivate male on male violence in the anomic spaces of supercapitalism – the border zones of Mexico and the United States, and the frontier mining communities in the Australian desert. However systemic gendered injustices, such as forced marriage of child female brides, sati the cremation of widows, genital cutting, honour crimes, rape and domestic violence against women, are forms of violence only experienced by the female sex. The book does not shirk away from female violence either. Carrington argues that if feminism wants to have a voice in the public, cultural, political and criminological debates about heightened, albeit often exaggerated, social concerns about growing female violence and engagement in terrorism, then new directions in theorising female violence are required. Feminist silences about the violent crimes, atrocities and acts of terrorism committed by the female sex leave anti-feminist explanations uncontested. This allows a discursive space for feminist backlash ideologues to flourish. This book contests those ideologies to offer counter explanations for the rise in female violence and female terrorism, in a global context where systemic gendered violence against women is alarming and entrenched. The world needs feminism to take hold across the globe, now more than ever.

Educating for the creative economy in emerging countries

In 1972, the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment expressed a growing realization that economic and social progress needed to be balanced with a concern for the environment and the stewardship of natural resources. The hard-to-grasp concept of "sustainable development" was first defined as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs" (World Commission on Environment and Development [WESDJ, 1987, p. 43). This definition contains two concepts: first, "human needs," with priority given to the world's poor, and, second, the environment's limits for meeting the state of technological and social organization (WESD, 1987, p. 43). At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (UN, 2002a), the focus on environmental protection broadened to encompass social justice and the fight against poverty as key principles of development that is sustainable. Three interdependent and mutually reinforcing "pillars" were recognized: economic development, social development, and environmental protection. These pillars must be established at local, national, and global levels. The complexity and interrelationship of critical issues such as poverty, wasteful consumption, urban decay, population growth, gender inequality, health, conflict, and the violation of human rights are addressed in all three pillars (Pigozzi, 2003, p. 3). Following the concept of sustainable development, we argue that the challenge for developing countries in contemporary society is to meet the very real need for economic development and opportunities for income generation, while avoiding the unintended and unwanted consequences of economic development and globalization. These consequences include social exclusion, loss of cultural heritage, and environmental and ecological problems.

The work of Media Arts in the age of digital production

This chapter uses as a beginning point Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The work of art in the age of technological reproducibility’(1935/2008) to discuss Media Arts education. It locates ‘Media Arts’ at the intersection of three key ideas: 1) media arts products as objects for popular and everyday consumption and intervention by individuals and broader audiences; 2) materiality and how individuals use their bodies and technologies to produce, combine and share digital materials and; 3) the construction of aesthetic knowledge and how this relates to critical and conceptual thinking. These ideas are discussed in the context of the development of curriculum for students at all ages of schooling, with specific attention given to the knowledge and skills students might develop within Media Arts education in primary schools. Examples from a Media Arts project in a primary school in Australia – where a new Media Arts national curriculum has been developed –are provided to illustrate the key ideas discussed in the chapter.

Overview of the ShARe/CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab 2014

This paper reports on the 2nd ShARe/CLEFeHealth evaluation lab which continues our evaluation resource building activities for the medical domain. In this lab we focus on patients' information needs as opposed to the more common campaign focus of the specialised information needs of physicians and other healthcare workers. The usage scenario of the lab is to ease patients and next-of-kins' ease in understanding eHealth information, in particular clinical reports. The 1st ShARe/CLEFeHealth evaluation lab was held in 2013. This lab consisted of three tasks. Task 1 focused on named entity recognition and normalization of disorders; Task 2 on normalization of acronyms/abbreviations; and Task 3 on information retrieval to address questions patients may have when reading clinical reports. This year's lab introduces a new challenge in Task 1 on visual-interactive search and exploration of eHealth data. Its aim is to help patients (or their next-of-kin) in readability issues related to their hospital discharge documents and related information search on the Internet. Task 2 then continues the information extraction work of the 2013 lab, specifically focusing on disorder attribute identification and normalization from clinical text. Finally, this year's Task 3 further extends the 2013 information retrieval task, by cleaning the 2013 document collection and introducing a new query generation method and multilingual queries. De-identified clinical reports used by the three tasks were from US intensive care and originated from the MIMIC II database. Other text documents for Tasks 1 and 3 were from the Internet and originated from the Khresmoi project. Task 2 annotations originated from the ShARe annotations. For Tasks 1 and 3, new annotations, queries, and relevance assessments were created. 50, 79, and 91 people registered their interest in Tasks 1, 2, and 3, respectively. 24 unique teams participated with 1, 10, and 14 teams in Tasks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The teams were from Africa, Asia, Canada, Europe, and North America. The Task 1 submission, reviewed by 5 expert peers, related to the task evaluation category of Effective use of interaction and targeted the needs of both expert and novice users. The best system had an Accuracy of 0.868 in Task 2a, an F1-score of 0.576 in Task 2b, and Precision at 10 (P@10) of 0.756 in Task 3. The results demonstrate the substantial community interest and capabilities of these systems in making clinical reports easier to understand for patients. The organisers have made data and tools available for future research and development.

Architecture in the South Pacific : the Ocean of Islands

Architecture in the South Pacific: The Ocean of Islands recounts the recent developments of the South Pacific and its fascinating architecture. This volume traces the European architectural overlay onto this scattered group of islands as well as the transition of these same islands towards a regional identity that has been fashioned by the remoteness of each location, the incomparable setting, and the distinctive ethnic mix of its inhabitants. A series of themed essays present the story of architectural development in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Wallis and Futuna, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Samoa and American Samoa, and French Polynesia. Recent architecture typifies the evolution of the islands as they have been subjected to the transformative waves of alien trade, religion, colonization, war and tourism, followed by post-colonialism and revived nationalism. As with the Pacific region itself, the most prominent characteristic of the architecture is its diversity. The blending of the universal and the local sets the stage for a fresh vision of the South Pacific across a wide range of building types, from spectacular mission churches to sensational resorts in paradise. This book, in full colour, will appeal to architects, armchair-tourists, students and all those for whom the South Pacific is the idyll of their dreams.

Users’ perception of using web search engines and their impact on the perceived intention to reuse the systems

In today’s world of information-driven society, many studies are exploring usefulness and ease of use of the technology. The research into personalizing next-generation user interface is also ever increasing. A better understanding of factors that influence users’ perception of web search engine performance would contribute in achieving this. This study measures and examines how users’ perceived level of prior knowledge and experience influence their perceived level of satisfaction of using the web search engines, and how their perceived level of satisfaction affects their perceived intention to reuse the system. 50 participants from an Australian university participated in the current study, where they performed three search tasks and completed survey questionnaires. A research model was constructed to test the proposed hypotheses. Correlation and regression analyses results indicated a significant correlation between (1) users’ prior level of experience and their perceived level of satisfaction in using the web search engines, and (2) their perceived level of satisfaction in using the systems and their perceived intention to reuse the systems. A theoretical model is proposed to illustrate the causal relationships. The implications and limitations of the study are also discussed.

Item reputation-aware recommender systems

Recommender systems provide personalized advice for customers online based on their own preferences, while reputation systems generate a community advice on the quality of items on the Web. Both systems use users’ ratings to generate their output. In this paper, we propose to combine reputation models with recommender systems to enhance the accuracy of recommendations. The main contributions include two methods for merging two ranked item lists which are generated based on recommendation scores and reputation scores, respectively, and a personalized reputation method to generate item reputations based on users’ interests. The proposed merging methods can be applicable to any recommendation methods and reputation methods, i.e., they are independent from generating recommendation scores and reputation scores. The experiments we conducted showed that the proposed methods could enhance the accuracy of existing recommender systems.

Epistemological lens : birth, death and ecology of documentary practices

This paper considers the epistemological life cycle of the camera lens in documentary practices. The 19th century industrial economies that manufactured and commercialised the camera lens have engendered political and economic contingencies on documentary practices to sustain a hegemonic and singular interpretive epistemology. Colonial documentary practices are considered from the viewpoint of manipulative hegemonic practices - all of which use the interpretive epistemology of the camera lens to capitalise a viewpoint which is singular and possesses the power to sustain its own status and economic privilege. I suggest that decolonising documentary practices can be nurtured in what Boaventura de Sousa Santos proposes as an 'ecology of knowledges' (Andreotti, Ahenakew, & Cooper 2011) - a way of including the epistemologies of cultures beyond the 'abyssal' (Santos), outside the limits of epistemological dominance. If an 'epistemicide' (Santos) of indigenous knowledges in the dominant limits has occurred then in an ecology of knowledges the limits become limitless and what were once invisible knowledges, come into their own ontological and epistemological being: as free agents and on their own terms. In an ecology of knowledges, ignorance and blindness may still exist but are not privileged. The decolonisation of documentary practices inevitably destabilises prevailing historicities and initiates ways for equal privilege to exist between multiple epistemologies.

Navigating uncertainty in Australia : fostering informed citizenship through teaching controversial issues with pre-service teachers

Australia is a multicultural immigrant society created by public policy and direct state action over a period of two hundred years. It is now one of the world’s most diverse societies. However, like many nations, Australia faces challenges to managing ‘unauthorized arrivals’ who claim to be refugees. The issue of how to deal with unauthorized arrivals is controversial and highly emotive as it challenges public policy and government capacity to manage the multicultural ‘mix’ of Australia’s population. It also raises questions about border security. Given that it is impossible to discern beforehand who is a ‘proper’ refugee and who is not, claims to refugee status by unauthorised arrivals in Australia need to be tested against international convention criteria devised by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). There are no simple solutions to controversial questions such as how and where should unauthorised arrivals, and the children accompanying them, be housed whilst their claims are investigated? Moreover, as this issue continues to prompt division and heated debate in Australian society, teachers new to the profession are often reluctant to explore it in the classroom. However, there are opportunities in national and state curriculum documents for the values dimensions of curriculum inquiries into controversial issues such as this to be addressed. For example, the most recent national statement on the goals for schooling in Australia, the Melbourne Declaration (MCEETYA, 2008), makes clear that Australian students need to be prepared for the challenges of the 21st century and to develop the capacity for innovation and complex problem-solving. The Melbourne Declaration informs the first national curriculum to be implemented in the Australian states and territories, and all other national and state initiatives. Its focus on developing active and informed citizens who can contribute to a socially cohesive society implies a capacity to deal with a range of issues associated with cultural diversity, This chapter explores the ways in which pre-service and early career teachers in one Australian state reflect upon curriculum opportunities to address controversial issues in the social sciences and history classroom. As part of their pre-service education, all the participants in this study completed a final year social science curriculum method unit that embedded a range of controversial issues, including the placement of children in Australian Immigration Detention Centres (IDCs), for investigation. By drawing from interviews and focus groups conducted with different cohorts of pre-service teachers in their final year of university study and beginning years of teaching, this chapter analyses the range of perceptions about how controversial issues can be examined in the secondary classroom as part of fostering informed citizenship. The discussion and analysis of the qualitative data in this study makes no claims for the representativeness of its findings, rather, a range of beginner teacher insights into a complex and important facet of teaching in a period of change and uncertainty is offered.

Capturing natural-colour 3D models of insects for species discovery and diagnostics

Collections of biological specimens are fundamental to scientific understanding and characterization of natural diversity - past, present and future. This paper presents a system for liberating useful information from physical collections by bringing specimens into the digital domain so they can be more readily shared, analyzed, annotated and compared. It focuses on insects and is strongly motivated by the desire to accelerate and augment current practices in insect taxonomy which predominantly use text, 2D diagrams and images to describe and characterize species. While these traditional kinds of descriptions are informative and useful, they cannot cover insect specimens "from all angles" and precious specimens are still exchanged between researchers and collections for this reason. Furthermore, insects can be complex in structure and pose many challenges to computer vision systems. We present a new prototype for a practical, cost-effective system of off-the-shelf components to acquire natural-colour 3D models of insects from around 3 mm to 30 mm in length. ("Natural-colour" is used to contrast with "false-colour", i.e., colour generated from, or applied to, gray-scale data post-acquisition.) Colour images are captured from different angles and focal depths using a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera rig and two-axis turntable. These 2D images are processed into 3D reconstructions using software based on a visual hull algorithm. The resulting models are compact (around 10 megabytes), afford excellent optical resolution, and can be readily embedded into documents and web pages, as well as viewed on mobile devices. The system is portable, safe, relatively affordable, and complements the sort of volumetric data that can be acquired by computed tomography. This system provides a new way to augment the description and documentation of insect species holotypes, reducing the need to handle or ship specimens. It opens up new opportunities to collect data for research, education, art, entertainment, biodiversity assessment and biosecurity control. © 2014 Nguyen et al.