130,579 research outputs found
Web Science
No full textOur understanding of the Web has not kept pace with its development. It is engineered using formally specified languages and protocols, but has large scale effects on society. Certain human activities – including education – have been altered irretrievably. This article argues for the development of the discipline of Web Science, to understand the reciprocal relationship between the Web and society at a number of scales, from technical protocols to emergent social behaviour, to ensure that the Web’s growth will continue, and will benefit society. The need for both analysis and engineering demands an inherently interdisciplinary approach. With this in mind, a new Web Science Research Initiative is briefly described
Keys under doormats - mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications
No full textAbstract
Twenty years ago, law enforcement organizations lobbied to require data and communication services to engineer their products to guarantee law enforcement access to all data. After lengthy debate and vigorous predictions of enforcement channels “going dark,” these attempts to regulate the emerging Internet were abandoned. In the intervening years, innovation on the Internet flourished, and law enforcement agencies found new and more effective means of accessing vastly larger quantities of data. Today we are again hearing calls for regulation to mandate the provision of exceptional access mechanisms. In this report, a group of computer scientists and security experts, many of whom participated in a 1997 study of these same topics, has convened to explore the likely effects of imposing extraordinary access mandates.
We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental insecurity of today’s Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse “forward secrecy” design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached.
The complexity of today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law
MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations
No full textInformation overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
"Closing the R&D Gap, Evaluating the Sources of R&D Spending"
No full textBoth spending and tax policies have been implemented in the United States with the goal of stimulating private sector research and development (R&D). Karier questions whether current R&D policy, especially the research and experimentation tax credit, can contribute to closing the gap between nondefense expenditures on R&D in the United States and such expenditures in other countries, such as Japan and Germany. He also explores possible changes to our current R&D policy to make it more effective.
Digital Divides and Web Science
No full textThe complexity of the digital divide is described, and it is argued that in fact there are several divides, not a single one. Relevant parameters include the dimension along which the divide takes place, the function of the technology in question, and the nature of the technology in question. It is argued that only a highly multidisciplinary approach to social issues in the context of the World Wide Web, including both analysis of the Web and its social context, and the synthesis of new engineering protocols, formalisms and standards, will have any lasting effect on such phenomena. A recent initiative to create a discipline called Web Science, taking the Web as a first-order object of study, is described
Development of the screen for limitations in mobility (SLIM): A self-report tool for surgical oncology patients
No full textAffiliated institutions include: Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (D. Law, E. Weitzner, V. Wheeler, N. Cooper), University of Toronto (N. Salbach)Purpose: Health care professionals do not always identify the limitations in functional mobility experienced by patients living with cancer and its treatment. Therefore, appropriate referral to rehabilitation does not always occur. The purpose of this study was to develop a self-report screening tool to identify surgical oncology patients requiring a referral to physical therapy to address functional mobility limitations. The face validity, content validity and comprehensibility of the tool were evaluated. Methods: A cross-sectional quantitative study was conducted using a step-wise process involving initial development of the tool, evaluation of its face and content validity by physical therapists (PTs) with experience in surgical oncology, and evaluation of its comprehensibility by former surgical oncology patients. Results: The tool was judged to have both face and content validity based on feedback from 10 PT-participants and a review by the research team. Comprehensibility of the items and instructions of the tool was confirmed by 7 patient-participants. The tool, named the Screen for Limitations In Mobility (SLIM), includes 13 items with 2 possible response options for each. Conclusions: The SLIM may assist in facilitating the referral process by identifying surgical oncology patients who would benefit from referral to physical therapy.Professional Advisory Committee of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centr
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Development of the screen for limitations in mobility (SLIM): A self-report tool for surgical oncology patients
No full textAffiliated institutions include: Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (D. Law, E. Weitzner, V. Wheeler, N. Cooper), University of Toronto (N. Salbach)Purpose: Health care professionals do not always identify the limitations in functional mobility experienced by patients living with cancer and its treatment. Therefore, appropriate referral to rehabilitation does not always occur. The purpose of this study was to develop a self-report screening tool to identify surgical oncology patients requiring a referral to physical therapy to address functional mobility limitations. The face validity, content validity and comprehensibility of the tool were evaluated. Methods: A cross-sectional quantitative study was conducted using a step-wise process involving initial development of the tool, evaluation of its face and content validity by physical therapists (PTs) with experience in surgical oncology, and evaluation of its comprehensibility by former surgical oncology patients. Results: The tool was judged to have both face and content validity based on feedback from 10 PT-participants and a review by the research team. Comprehensibility of the items and instructions of the tool was confirmed by 7 patient-participants. The tool, named the Screen for Limitations In Mobility (SLIM), includes 13 items with 2 possible response options for each. Conclusions: The SLIM may assist in facilitating the referral process by identifying surgical oncology patients who would benefit from referral to physical therapy.Professional Advisory Committee of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centr
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