Search results

For the storage of information for subsequent retrieval of desired items, two stages of analysis are essential. The first is the determination of the subject content of a given article or paper; the second is the selection of certain words, groups of words, or classification headings by which the subject content is to be represented, either directly or by a suitable coding. Some workers still look forward to the day when it will be possible for the whole of a text to be read and ‘understood’ automatically by a machine; the ‘understanding’ process has been envisaged either as a process of selection of terms by the measure of word frequency, or word‐pair frequency (adjacent terms or terms not too far separated in one sentence) in the text, or by some process of automatic linguistic analysis. Such methods appear unsuitable for several reasons: language, as normally used, is a very difficult medium for exact expression (hence the value of mathematics) and few authors write well enough to avoid all ambiguities; a human reader accustomed to the subject can easily overcome any difficulties due to poor grammar, badly expressed arguments, excess brevity or prolixity in writing and even, sometimes, actual errors; a machine can not do so. Furthermore, the content of a paper is rarely of uniform importance throughout, and it is not worth recording, for subsequent retrieval, details which are merely repetitions of matters described earlier and better elsewhere, and not essential to the main purpose of the paper; for example, in a paper on evaporator design, a description of a standard method of analysis, applied to the contents of the evaporator in determining the efficiency of the design, will not be worth indexing; in a search for analytical methods, retrieval of such a paper would hardly be considered pertinent. A human reader, though far from infallible, can usefully make such judgments.

Having a baby is a sensitive matter and the child's body occupies a relevant space within the imaginary and the concerns of the intentional, biomedicalized contemporary reproducers. Besides, the myth of ‘the perfect child’ claims specific moral injunctions about making bodies since the body conveys social recognition codes both through flesh or genetic matrix and embodied practices. So, having a child with an unexpected ‘defective’ body becomes a stressful challenge for the reproductive experience of the intentional parent(s). In any case, both parent(s) and biomedical professionals enact a hierarchization among the ‘damaged’ materials of the child's body based on the perceived and/or the classified degree of physical or mental abnormality, on its behavioural embodiments and on the possibility to re-order, fix and control the (biosocial) disorder of an abnormal unable and/or undisciplined body.

Based on recent investigations on reproduction and disability in two regions of Italy, this essay comparatively investigates the experiences of two associations of parents with asthmatic and ADHD children.

Specifically, I tried to explore how parents of children with misleading bodies emotionally, practically and morally face their unexpected reproduction, and if and how they are being entrapped in or resist the pressure of neuro-biomedical governance, schooling disciplining techniques and social blame. I tried to articulate some suggesting concepts, such as ‘delegate biopolitics’ and ‘discursive surveillance’ (Memmi, 2008), and ‘self-constraint behaviours’ (Elias, 1998), in order to analyze ethnographic material.

This chapter shows the prevalence, trends and heterogeneity in maternal smoking around birth in the United Kingdom (UK), focussing on the war and post-war reconstruction period in which there exists surprisingly little systematic data on (maternal) smoking behaviours. Within this context, the authors highlight relevant events, the release of new information about the harms of smoking and changes in (government) policy aimed at reducing smoking prevalence. The authors show stark changes in smoking prevalence over a 30-year period, highlight the onset of the social gradient in smoking as well as genetic heterogeneities in smoking trends.

Two general requirements for overall measures of retrieval effectiveness are proposed, namely that the measure should be as far as possible independent of generality (this is interpreted to mean that it can be described in terms of recall and fallout), and that it should be able to measure the effectiveness of a performance curve (it should not be restricted to a simple 2×2 table). Several measures that have been proposed are examined with these conditions in mind. It turns out that most of the satisfactory ones are directly or indirectly related to Swets' measure A, the area under the recall‐fallout curve. In particular, Brookes' measure S and Rocchio's normalized recall are versions of A.

In the money under review the meetings of the Group have been lively and well attended, with over twenty members present at many meetings. The following visitors and overseas members were welcomed at Group meetings:

Some parameters and techniques in use for describing the results of tests on IR systems are analysed. Several considerations outside the scope of the usual 2 x 2 table are relevant to the choice of parameters. In particular, a variable which produces a ‘performance curve’ of a system corresponds to an extension of the 2 x 2 table. Also, the statistical relationships between parameters are all‐important. It is considered that precision is not such a useful measure of performance (in conjunction with recall) as fallout. A more powerful alternative to Cleverdon's ‘inevitable inverse relationship between recall and precision’ is proposed and justified, namely that the recall‐fallout graph is convex.

Before documentation became his primary interest, Robert Fairthorne would conventionally have been described as an applied mathematician. Such a description, however, does not give a true indication of his special abilities. He is, in fact, dedicated to the task of bringing to science and engineering the benefits of mathematics in all its forms, and to him such classifications as ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ were mere irrelevancies.

A small‐scale test of Metals abstracts index, with ten profiles and five sections of the abstracts as data base, was carried out with a methodology which endeavoured to simulate real life use of this Index by an information scientist for current awareness searching. The performance results were 67 per cent recall, 40 per cent precision and 2 per cent fallout. An error analysis showed that 65 per cent of the errors were attibutable to human (searcher) factors. Some of the factors that must inevitably affect the assessment of printed indexes are discussed, together with the observation of two unexpected phenomena, namely an apparent relationship between precision and searching effort, and relationships between generality and both recall and fallout.

Reports a laboratory comparison of the effectiveness and efficiency of five index languages in the subject area of library and information science; three post‐co‐ordinate languages, Compressed Term, Uncontrolled, and Hierarchically Structured, and two pre‐co‐ordinate ones, Hierarchically Structured and Relational Indexing. Eight test comparisons were made, and factors studied were index language specificity and linkage, indexing specificity and exhaustivity, method of co‐ordination, the precision devices of partitioning and relational operators, and the provision of context in the search file. Full details of the test and retrieval results are presented.