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Informatics in the political science classroom is becoming a more influential phenomenon. Lecture presentation techniques now frequently include PowerPoint and other multimedia content. Assignments often require research and analysis be completed on Internet. The increased prevalence of IT in the classroom is producing students with informatics skills. Informatics is defined to include IT and the social and behavior implications of the technology. Acquiring informatics skills are discussed as improving students' ability to accomplish analysis and synthesis. Informatics improve students' ability to organize and discuss many phenomenon. The shared understanding they gain from informatics allows analytic routines that produce more effective and efficient student analysis. This paper presents a theoretical technique for evaluating student gains in informatics from political science education from the cognitive perspective. A baseline approach is employed to accomplish informatics assessment. First, a study is made of how informatics sophisticated people cognitize informatics issues. Second, a comparison is made between the sophisticated informatics baseline and how students cognitize informatics. Longitudinal evaluation of students is proposed to determine if students are more informatics sophisticated as a result of political science education.An e-survey conducted by the paper's author allowed theoretically establishing the baseline for informatics advanced people. The e-survey's sample was two-thirds comprised of Ph.D's. Results for a series of questions asking respondents to identify an opposing idea from a list of informatics related term were analyzed. These question resembled free association questions in psychological testing. The data produced was interpretively coded on an X axis which was a continuum between personal restrictions and personal freedoms and a Y axis that represents governmental and non-governmental values. Analysis of this coded data allowed cognitive mapping for each response word. Graphical analysis of this data is useful in perceiving semantic differentials among response words. The most frequently mentioned response phrases are presented graphically with symbols sized proportionally to how often the words are mentioned. Less frequently mentioned words are in type around the major concepts. This cognitive mapping has possibilities for mathematical analysis since X and Y coordinates are used in each coding decision. Future work could mathematically compare students gains to the informatics sophisticated sample's cognitive maps in order to evaluate classroom gains from informatics content. This paper hypothesizes that informatics content in the political science classroom would cause students' cognitive maps to increasingly resemble the cognitive maps of the informatics advanced sample. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coded corpora are used for basic and applied research in social and computational sciences. Yet the manual annotation of collections of text—the coding—is often conducted in an ad hoc, inconsistent, non-replicable, and unreliable manner. It is not that there are no techniques or that tools do not exist. Rather, it is that they tend to be hidden away in small niche subfields where knowledge of them is limited to a small research community. As a result, many researchers code text for a variety of reasons, but it remains very difficult to share these annotations with other researchers or to work on them with researchers from other disciplines. This paper argues that what are needed are more universal annotation metrics, a standard lexicon, and widely shared, semi-automated coding tools that make the work of humans more useful, fungible, and durable. Ideally, these tools would be interoperable, or combined in a single system. The new system would allow humans to create annotations and allow other experts to efficiently validate and adjudicate their work. At a deeper level, this calls for better codified approaches to training and deploying coders—an annotation science subfield—so that a more coherent and collaborative research community can form around this promising methodological domain. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What difference does e-government make to the capacity of governments to interact with citizens? How does it affect government's place in social and informational networks - the 'nodality' of contemporary government? What is the structure of 'government on the web' and how do citizens experience government on-line? This paper uses methods from computer science (particularly webmetrics) and political science (a 'tools of government' approach) to go further than previous work in developing a methodology to quantitatively analyse the structure of government on the web, building on Petricek et al (2006). It applies structural metrics (via webcrawling) and user metrics (via user experiments) to the web sites of comparable ministries concerned with foreign affairs in three countries (Australia, the US and the UK). The results are used to assess the on-line presence of the three foreign offices along five indicators: visibility, accessibility, extroversion, navigability and competitiveness. These indicators might be developed further in the future for use by both researchers (to assess e-government initiatives) and by governments (to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their on-line presence). Governments which are successful in developing their web sites in this way are likely to have greater visibility to citizens, businesses and other governments, strengthening nodality as a policy tool. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scaling up processes in chemistry, engineering, and computer programming provides lessons for how public organizations might cope with increased mandates. In all of these fields, processes that work at a smaller scale may only be able to increase up to a choke point. After the choke point, the processes could risk catastrophic failure because new interactions not visible at smaller levels of production can have massive consequences at larger levels. The International Atomic Energy Agency's safeguards programs offer an interesting test case for applying notions of scalability to public organizations. Scalability analysis shows that the agency must do more than simply increase its budget in order to keep up with an expanding workload. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]