The lost 1990s? Personal reflections on a history of participatory technology development

This article traces a history of agricultural participatory research, largely from the author's personal experience. Participatory research in the 1970s was mostly led by disciplinary scientists, and characterised by innovative activities and open academic debate, with some recognition that policy and development practice was a political process. The 1980s saw a shift to learning from past experience, and a participatory mainstream developed, seeking methods for scaling up. Meanwhile, others sought to understand and influence policy and institutional change in their political and cultural contexts, and to keep open the academic debates. The author considers the 1990s as ‘lost years’, during which mainstream participatory practitioners became inward-looking development generalists, not so interested in learning from others outside their paradigm. The late 2000s provide a chance to re-recognise the political and cultural embeddedness of science and technology; re-introduce strong, widely based disciplines; and learn from past activities that resulted in positive development outcomes (planned or unplanned).     

The “Science of Science Policy”: reflections on the important questions and the challenges they present

Developing the “Science of Science Policy” will require data collection and analysis related to the processes of innovation and technological change, and the effects of government policy on those processes. There has been much work on these topics in the last three decades, but there remain difficult problems of finding proxies for subtle concepts, endogeneity, distinguishing private and social returns, untangling cumulative effects, measuring the impact of government programs in a true “but for” sense, and sorting out national and global effects. I offer observations on how to think about these issues. This paper was presented as the Keynote Address at the NSF Workshop on Advancing Measures of Innovation: Knowledge Flows, Business Metrics, and Measurement Strategies, Arlington, VA, June 2006.     

高职经管类专业课程开发初探

高职经管类专业与工程技术类专业具有明显的不同特征，在基于工作过程的课程开发中要认识其特征、明确基本要求及步骤，并要处理好“六个关系”。     

The regular article tracking developments at the national level in key European countries in the area of IT and communications – Co-ordinated by Herbert Smith LLP and contributed to by firms across Europe

This column provides a concise alerting service of important national developments in key European countries. Part of its purpose is to compliment the Journal's feature articles and Briefing Notes by keeping readers abreast of what is currently happening “on the ground” at a national level in implementing EU level legislation and international conventions and treaties. Where an item of European National News is of particular significance, CLSR may also cover it in more detail in the current or a subsequent edition.     

基因伦理研究的文化价值

基因伦理研究立足于现实的技术现象及其伦理难题，通过技术观的变革，实现技术创新与人文关怀的结合；通过伦理观的变革，实现价值选择与制度安排的统一；通过生命观的变革，坚持人的尊严。体现了基因伦理研究的文化价值。     

现场毒品探测技术解析

毒品犯罪是全球性的问题,世界各国在不断加强开发提高检测精度和识别毒品能力的新技术。笔者通过介绍当前国际上通用的先进的毒品查缉技术的原理、特点、技术优势以及适用的缉毒场合,对不同的查缉技术和装备进行分类比较,着重介绍人体藏毒探测技术、行李箱包探测技术、车辆和集装箱探测技术为缉毒实战部门提供选择,同时还介绍了正在研制中的几种毒品探测技术,以及毒品探测技术未来几年的发展趋势。     

中职学校教师的资源共享平台建设

在先进的网络技术支持下,构建一个教师的资源共享平台,有效地实现对知识的收集与存储、交流与共享、评价与创新。让中职学校的教师们形成一个知识团队,摆脱教学困境,发挥集体智慧的力量去实现教育目标。     

电子商务立法刍议

我国的电子商务立法 ,可先采用条例形式 ,在今后实践中再充实完善。电子商务法应设置总则 ;未满十周岁的儿童不能成为电子商务的主体 ,所产生的法律后果由监护人承担 ;认证机构应具有电子商务的主体资格。对签署、证据、成立等行为应作出效力规定 ;各级工商行政管理局是电子商务的行政管理机关 ,各级邮电管理局也应成为管理机关。当事人在交易中违反民事法律 (规 )、合同约定的 ,均应承担民事责任。     

探析我国警犬技术的立法规范——以两起袭击警犬案为例

警犬技术作为我国公安刑事技术的重要组成部分在公安工作中发挥了不可替代的作用,具有技术装备和武器装备的双重特性.在实际工作中,由于缺少警犬技术方面的立法规范,致使许多袭击警犬和警犬误用的行为得不到有效地规范,从而出现了警犬损伤和无辜群众受到损害的现象.     

Language translation for file paths

Forensic examiners are frequently confronted with content in languages that they do not understand, and they could benefit from machine translation into their native language. But automated translation of file paths is a difficult problem because of the minimal context for translation and the frequent mixing of multiple languages within a path. This work developed a prototype implementation of a file-path translator that first identifies the language for each directory segment of a path, and then translates to English those that are not already English nor artificial words. Brown's LA-Strings utility for language identification was tried, but its performance was found inadequate on short strings and it was supplemented with clues from dictionary lookup, Unicode character distributions for languages, country of origin, and language-related keywords. To provide better data for language inference, words used in each directory over a large corpus were aggregated for analysis. The resulting directory-language probabilities were combined with those for each path segment from dictionary lookup and character-type distributions to infer the segment's most likely language. Tests were done on a corpus of 50.1 million file paths looking for 35 different languages. Tests showed 90.4% accuracy on identifying languages of directories and 93.7% accuracy on identifying languages of directory/file segments of file paths, even after excluding 44.4% of the paths as obviously English or untranslatable. Two of seven proposed language clues were shown to impair directory-language identification. Experiments also compared three translation methods: the Systran translation tool, Google Translate, and word-for-word substitution using dictionaries. Google Translate usually performed the best, but all still made errors with European languages and a significant number of errors with Arabic and Chinese.