The Search for Why


Book Description

EVER WONDERED WHY PEOPLE REALLY DO WHAT THEY DO? (AND WHAT WE COULD ACCOMPLISH IF WE ONLY KNEW?) We need a clear-eyed look at what’s happening in society right now. Social systems are being undermined, or failing, before our eyes. The trust that we once had in organizations, corporations, journalism, education, science, medicine, government—and even one another—is compromised. People are feeling isolated and alone. How do we move forward as a society? How can we connect with and understand one another? How do we find productive ways to communicate, meeting those we are trying to reach where they are and speaking to what’s important to them? And how do we have robust and productive dialogue that (re)builds meaningful, supportive, and resilient relationships and institutions? Bob Raleigh suggests that any approach must start by understanding the why. The Search for Why compellingly demonstrates that we need a better model and follows Raleigh on his career journey to find one. In this book, Raleigh draws on his decades of experience in market research and public-communication strategy, the possibilities of our contemporary era of big data, and groundbreaking research from psychology, cognitive and behavioral sciences, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy, all of which have informed the Model of Why approach that he proposes. For anyone looking to persuade people, heal divisions, or build better relationships, The Search for Why is a crucial step in the right direction.




Understanding Search Engines


Book Description

The second edition of Understanding Search Engines: Mathematical Modeling and Text Retrieval follows the basic premise of the first edition by discussing many of the key design issues for building search engines and emphasizing the important role that applied mathematics can play in improving information retrieval. The authors discuss important data structures, algorithms, and software as well as user-centered issues such as interfaces, manual indexing, and document preparation. Readers will find that the second edition includes significant changes that bring the text up to date on current information retrieval methods. For example, the authors have added a completely new chapter on link-structure algorithms used in search engines such as Google, and the chapter on user interface has been rewritten to specifically focus on search engine usability. To reflect updates in the literature on information retrieval, the authors have added new recommendations for further reading and expanded the bibliography. In addition, the index has been updated and streamlined to make it more reader friendly.




A Search for Understanding


Book Description




Query Understanding for Search Engines


Book Description

This book presents a systematic study of practices and theories for query understanding of search engines. These studies can be categorized into three major classes. The first class is to figure out what the searcher wants by extracting semantic meaning from the searcher’s keywords, such as query classification, query tagging, and query intent understanding. The second class is to analyze search queries and then translate them into an enhanced query that can produce better search results, such as query spelling correction or query rewriting. The third class is to assist users in refining or suggesting queries in order to reduce users’ search effort and satisfy their information needs, such as query auto-completion and query suggestion. Query understanding is a fundamental part of search engines. It is responsible to precisely infer the intent of the query formulated by the search user, to correct spelling errors in his/her query, to reformulate the query to capture its intent more accurately, and to guide the user in formulating a query with precise intent. The book will be invaluable to researchers and graduate students in computer or information science and specializing in information retrieval or web-based systems, as well as to researchers and programmers working on the development or improvement of products related to search engines.




Karen Horney


Book Description

Karen Horney is regarded by many as one of the most important psychoanalytic thinkers of the 20th century. This book argues that Horney's inner struggles, in particular her compulsive need for men, induced her to embark on a search for self-understanding.




In Search of Understanding


Book Description

The activities that transpire within the classroom either help or hinder students' learning. Any meaningful discussion of educational renewal, therefore, must focus explicitly and directly on the classroom, and on the teaching and learning that occur within it. This book presents a case for the development of classrooms in which students are encouraged to construct deep understandings of important concepts. Jacqueline Grennon Brooks and Martin Brooks present a new set of images for educational settings, images that emerge from student engagement, interaction, reflection, and construction. They have considerable experience in creating constructivist educational settings and conducting research on those settings. Authentic examples are provided throughout the book, as are suggestions for administrators, teachers, and policymakers. For the new edition of their popular book, the authors have written an introduction that places their work in today's educational renewal setting. Today, they urge, the case for constructivist classrooms is much stronger and the need more critical. Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.




In Search of Intercultural Understanding


Book Description

"In Search of Intercultural Understanding" is a practical guidebook for living and working across cultures. In a hands-on and visual approach, this guide offers new insights and practical advice on adjusting and coping with the experience abroad. With a variety of stories, quotations, exercises and illustrations, the reader is presented with an easy-to-understand survey of cross-cultural issues that will enhance the global experience and provide guidance on becoming interculturally competent.




Understanding and Improving Information Search


Book Description

This edited book adopts a cognitive perspective to provide breadth and depth to state-of-the-art research related to understanding, analyzing, predicting and improving one of the most prominent and important classes of behavior of modern humans, information search. It is timely as the broader research area of cognitive computing and cognitive technology have recently attracted much attention, and there has been a surge in interest to develop systems and technology that are more compatible with human cognitive abilities. Divided into three interlocking sections, the first introduces the foundational concepts of information search from a cognitive computing perspective to highlight the research questions and approaches that are shared among the contributing authors. Relevant concepts from psychology, information and computing sciences are addressed. The second section discusses methods and tools that are used to understand and predict information search behavior and how the cognitive perspective can provide unique insights into the complexities of the behavior in various contexts. The final part highlights a number of areas of applications of which education and training, collaboration and conversational search interfaces are important ones. Understanding and Improving Information Search - A Cognitive Approach includes contributions from cognitive psychologists, information and computing scientists around the globe, including researchers from Europe (France, Netherlands, Germany), the US, and Asia (India, Japan), providing their unique but coherent perspectives to the core issues and questions most relevant to our current understanding of information search behavior and improving information search.




Understanding Deaf Culture


Book Description

This book presents a ‘Traveller’s Guide’ to Deaf Culture, starting from the premise that Deaf cultures have an important contribution to make to other academic disciplines, and human lives in general. Within and outside Deaf communities, there is a need for an account of the new concept of Deaf culture, which enables readers to assess its place alongside work on other minority cultures and multilingual discourses. The book aims to assess the concepts of culture, on their own terms and in their many guises and to apply these to Deaf communities. The author illustrates the pitfalls which have been created for those communities by the medical concept of ‘deafness’ and contrasts this with his new concept of “Deafhood”, a process by which every Deaf child, family and adult implicitly explains their existence in the world to themselves and each other.




Understanding and Evaluating Search Experience


Book Description

This book is intended for anyone interested in learning more about how search works and how it is evaluated. We all use search—it's a familiar utility. Yet, few of us stop and think about how search works, what makes search results good, and who, if anyone, decides what good looks like. Search has a long and glorious history, yet it continues to evolve, and with it, the measurement and our understanding of the kinds of experiences search can deliver continues to evolve, as well. We will discuss the basics of how search engines work, how humans use search engines, and how measurement works. Equipped with these general topics, we will then dive into the established ways of measuring search user experience, and their pros and cons. We will talk about collecting labels from human judges, analyzing usage logs, surveying end users, and even touch upon automated evaluation methods. After introducing different ways of collecting metrics, we will cover experimentation as it applies to search evaluation. The book will cover evaluating different aspects of search—from search user interface (UI), to results presentation, to the quality of search algorithms. In covering these topics, we will touch upon many issues in evaluation that became sources of controversy—from user privacy, to ethical considerations, to transparency, to potential for bias. We will conclude by contrasting measuring with understanding, and pondering the future of search evaluation.