Steps Toward More Effective Implementation of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing

The goal of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing is to improve testing practices, but their impact on practice appears spotty. Self-regulation clearly fails in some instances. The establishment of an external agency to oversee testing practices and adherence to the Standards would face substantial hurdles, and the ambiguity of many of the Standards would hobble such an organization if one were created. Many of the Standards are general statements of principle, and past controversies make clear that we in the field often disagree about the reasons for them, their applicability to specific cases, and their practical meaning in specific contexts. This paper argues that the field should follow two approaches to lessen this ambiguity. First, using journals, conferences, and other vehicles, we should foster more frequent and more protracted debate about the practical meaning of key Standards, such as 13.6 and 13.7, which mandate that a decision that will have a "major impact" on a student should not be based on a single score. Second, future revisions of the Standards should use concrete examples of testing practices to clarify the meaning of the Standards, much as the legal system uses case law to clarify the meaning of the general principles embodied in statutes .     

Archival theory in Italy today

Archival theory in Italy has a long tradition, going back as far as the second half of the nineteenth century, and with roots in the 17th and 18th centuries. Central theme in the theory is themetodo storico, the principle of provenance, for the first time expressed in the late 19th century by Bonaini and Bongi. In the following decades archivists like Casanova and Cencetti were among the leading authors. Elio Lodolini assigned himself the task to synthesize ideas and notions, within a clear distinctions between records (registratura) and archives. One of the overall characteristics of the rich Italian literature is the stressing of the cultural value of archives. I have twice treated before the theme of archival theory in Italy from the fifties up to the nineties. The first time on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of theScuola speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari dell'Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma in 1989, when there was an international round table on archival science in the State Archives of Rome. My essay,Italian archival science today, has been published in the proceedings of the meeting (cfr. Donato Tamblé,L'archivistica in Italia oggi, inStudi sull'archivistica, by Roma: Elio Lodolini, 1992). Some years later, in 1993, I published a book on contemporary Italian archival theory (Donato Tamblé,La teoria archivistica italiana contemporanea (1950–1990). Profilo storico-critico (Roma, 1993) which was the sequel to the volume of Elio Lodolini on Italian archival history — (Lineamenti di storia dell'archivistica italiana (Roma, 1991). The purpose of my book was that of locating and identifying the scientific object of archival science as it developed and was clarified in the thinking and in the lucubration of the contemporary Italian Archivists.     

Book reviews

^cAbd al‐Malik b. Habib. Kitāb al‐Ta'rij (La historia). Edición y estudio por Jorge Aguadé. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas & Instituto de Cooperación con el Mundo Arabe, 1991 (Fuentes Arabico‐Hispanas, 1). 163 + 224 pp. [Arabic title: Kltāb al‐Ta'tikh]

Kedar, Benjamin Z., ed. The Horns of Hattin. Jerusalem and London: Yad Izhak Ben‐Zvi, Israel Exploration Society and Variorum 1992. 368 pp., 12 plates; $74.75 (cloth).

Köprülü, Mehmed Fuad. The Seljuks of Anatolia: Their History and Culture According to Local Muslim Sources. Translated and edited by Gary Leiser. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1992. xi +101 pp., $22.00 (cloth).

Cameron, Averil and Conrad, Lawrence I., eds. The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East: Problems in the Literary Source Material (Papers in the First Workshop on Late Antiquity and Early Islam). Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1992. xiv + 428pp., 12 plates; $29.25 (cloth).

Vereno, Ingolf. Studien zum ältesten alchemistischen Schrifttum. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1992 (Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, 155). 414pp.

Tolan, John. Petrus Alfonsi and his Medieval Readers. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1993. xv + 288pp., $34.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper).

Lassner, Jacob. Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994. 281 pp., $19.95 (paper), $49.95 (cloth).

Menocal, María Rosa. Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994. xv + 295pp., $34.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).

Massignon, Louis. The Passion of al‐Hallāj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam. Translated and edited by Herbert Mason. Abridged edition, Bollingen Series XCVIII. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. xxxi + 293pp.

Viguera Molins, Maria Jesús. El Islam en Aragón. Saragossa: Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada, 1995 (Colección “Mariano de Pano y Ruata”, 9), 174 pp., 182 ills. in colour, maps, diagrams, charts etc No price stated.     

Controlling the field of academic economics in Hungary, 1953–1976

Conclusions On the basis of these findings, I suggest that the structure and organisation of the field of Hungarian economics under state socialism should be described as a case of partitioned bureaucracy.⁹ The compromise between research economists and the political elite in the New Course era between 1953 and 1955¹⁰ survived the post-1956 reaction in so far as political economy, with its predominantly legitimatory and ideological functions, remained partitioned from the other sectors in the field through the remainder of the state-socialist period. This secured considerable protection both for Marxist-Leninist political economy—which faced the destabilising effects of exposure to the findings of serious empirical research—and for the other sectors, which were professionally oriented and earnestly interested in the pursuit of unbiased empirical research, free from stifling agitprop interference. Our data concerning the reputational control of the field reflects only one, although very important, aspect of this partitioning. Another and much plainer aspect is that, from the early 1960s, the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee no longer exercised control over the field, except in the political economy sector.The proposition about the mechanism paradigm should not be taken seriously as a statement of a Kuhnian type of intellectual organisation of Hungarian economics, with reform economics at its hard theoretical core. But it should certainly be taken seriously as a reflection of the sociopolitical structure which emerged and developed from the mid-1950s onwards. Neither the politicians nor the economists saw as necessary or even contemplated the integration of Hungarian economic research with Western mainstream economic thought. In exchange for the professional expertise and socio-economic intelligence necessary for the exercise of power, Hungary's state-socialist political class offered their economists relative autonomy and freedom from interference. The price the economists had to pay was partly to refrain from openly and systematically challenging the beliefs perpetuated by the political economy of socialism, and partly to accept in their research the paramountcy of policy orientation. But this burden they assumed willingly since it made them the only group within Hungary's academic intelligentsia—indeed, the only group in Hungarian society outside the political class—with the privilege of being coopted to the institutions with power over some restricted domains of policymaking. After 1989, especially under the conservative Antall government, this proved less than advantageous.¹¹ Although the benevolence of many critics is open to question, it could greatly benefit the field if the economists' expulsion from contemporary politics went hand in hand with provision of the material, intellectual and institutional conditions for a new approach where a fundamentally scientific orientation is paramount.     

Analysis of the urban/rural broadband divide in Canada: Using GIS in planning terrestrial wireless deployment

Millions of Canadians residing in Canada's northern, isolated, rural, and remote communities do not have broadband Internet access. This situation has led to a national “broadband divide.” That is, the deployment of wireline broadband is very limited in Canada's northern, isolated, rural, and remote areas because of the significant expense of installation and maintenance of the wired infrastructure needed to reach dwellings in these locations.Terrestrial broadband wireless technology, on the other hand, does not entail the same kind of physical infrastructure. As a result, there are dramatic changes in how spatial considerations affect the provision of broadband Internet services (BIS) to areas beyond the urban zone. In particular, the spatial question is now focused on assessing the capacity for different technological solutions to reach profitable population bases, and brings to the forefront organizations that are developing non-line-of-sight (NLOS) technologies that would permit wireless Internet access over much greater distances than current solutions.We begin this paper by establishing the importance of broadband connectivity to Canada's northern, isolated, rural, and remote communities. This discussion comments on the role of the Government of Canada in the provision of broadband connectivity to residents of these communities, and outlines the current regulatory issues that govern wireless services and policy formulation.The second part of the paper illustrates the use of geographic information system (GIS) approaches in the study of wireless broadband planning and deployment. Case study findings suggest that GIS applications can make a significant contribution to the analysis of wireless deployment planning, to the understanding of the relationships between wireless signal sources and consumers, and to the spatial configuration of terrestrial wireless broadband networks. We conclude the paper by discussing how the GIS approach employed could be used to inform the public policy process with regard to increasing access to broadband Internet services in all regions of the country, and thereby providing the opportunity for all Canadians, regardless of location, to fully participate in the Information Society.     

Multilingual modeling of cross-lingual spelling variants

Technical term translations are important for cross-lingual information retrieval. In many languages, new technical terms have a common origin rendered with different spelling of the underlying sounds, also known as cross-lingual spelling variants (CLSV). To find the best CLSV in a text database index, we contribute a formulation of the problem in a probabilistic framework, and implement this with an instance of the general edit distance using weighted finite-state transducers. Some training data is required when estimating the costs for the general edit distance. We demonstrate that after some basic training our new multilingual model is robust and requires little or no adaptation for covering additional languages, as the model takes advantage of language independent transliteration patterns. We train the model with medical terms in seven languages and test it with terms from varied domains in six languages. Two test languages are not in the training data. Against a large text database index, we achieve 64–78 % precision at the point of 100% recall. This is a relative improvement of 22% on the simple edit distance.