Creating a Student Centered Learning Environment at the University of Denver

A team of faculty members at the University of Denver changed the learning environment in key courses in the Department of Engineering from predominately teacher centered to student centered. Through this funded project new grading methods were implemented, classrooms were renovated and wired with studio layouts to facilitate learning, the Engineering Circuits Laboratory was rewired and instrumented for automated data acquisition and reporting, and two new pedagogical approaches were developed. At the onset of the project, six goals were established related to student learning. The introduction of industry standard hardware and software provided students with unprecedented hands‐on experience and project related activities stimulated faculty innovations in other current and future courses. Assessment results indicate that the new grading system improved the clarity of expectations for students before assignments were given resulting in increased reported motivation for learning in many courses. Even though course GPAs did not always reflect higher achievement on graded work, faculty members firmly believe that deeper understanding was achieved because more complex material was assimilated.     

Effects of urbanization on the aquatic fauna of the Line Creek watershed, Atlanta—a satellite perspective

Impervious surface area (ISA) was derived for a period from 1979 to 1997 from Landsat MSS and TM data for the Line Creek watershed that lies to the south of the city of Atlanta, GA. The change in ISA is presented as an ecological indicator to examine the cumulative water resource impacts on mussel population in three sub-watersheds of Line Creek—namely, Line, Flat, and Whitewater creeks. The satellite analysis shows that ISA expansion occurred substantially from 1987 to 1997 and is predominantly in industrial, commercial, and shopping center (ICS) complexes but also in smaller lot-size residential development. Evidence of mussel habitat degradation is indicated and loss of species (in the region of 50 to 70%) is present in areas where ISA expansion is observed—specifically in ICS complex development in and around Peachtree City that drains directly into the Line and Flat creeks. This is in marked contrast to Whitewater Creek where overall development of ISA is less and no major loss of mussel species is observed.     

Metric-based reasoning about pseudocode design in the partial metrics system

The goal of the PMS project is to produce an environment in which the intelligent online assessment of the design for large-scale ADA programming projects is provided. The focus is on the representation of knowledge about the design process for an individual module. Changes in pseudocode complexity are measured in terms of partial metrics. These metrics can take the designers inferences about the pseudocode program structure into account when assessing module complexity. Next, a model of the stepwise refinement process is given which demonstrates how pseudocode elaboration decisions can be modelled in partial metric terms. Finally, the decisions associated with each refinement step for 17 example refinements taken from the computer science literature are described using partial metrics.     

Building a user model implicitly from a cooperative advisory dialog

This paper reviews existing methods for building user models to support adaptive, interactive systems, identifies sigificant problems with these approaches, and describes a new method for implicitly acquiring user models from an ongoing user-system dialog. Existing explicit user model acquisition methods, such as user edited models or model building dialogs put additional burden on the user and introduce artificial model acquisition dialogs. Hand coding stereotypes, another explicit acquisition method, is a tedious and error-prone process. On the other hand, implicit acquisition techniques such as computing presuppositions or entailments either draw too few inferences to be generally useful, or too many to be trusted.In contrast, this paper describes GUMAC, a General User Model Acquisition Component that uses heuristic rules to make default inferences about users' beliefs from their interaction with an advisory expert system. These rules are based on features of human action and conversation that constrain people's behavior and establish expectations about their knowledge. The application of these rules is illustrated with two examples of extended dialogs between users and an investment advisory system. During the course of these conversations, GUMAC is able to acquire an extensive model of the users' beliefs about the aspects of the domain considered in the dialog. These models, in turn, provide the sort of information needed by an explanation generator to tailor explanations the advisory system gives to its users.     

Electrostatic Droplet Growth in a Neutrally Buoyant Emulsion

Droplet growth is examined in a water-in-oil type emulsion where the droplets are subjected exclusively to viscous and dielectrophoretic forces. The latter are produced by the interaction of the droplets with an otherwise uniformly imposed electric field. Theoretical considerations are presented as a basis for understanding and interpreting the experiments. An emulsion consisting of deionized water droplets in a silicone oil of specific gravity I is subjected to a uniform 60 Hz, ac electrostatic field. Initially, the droplets are fairly monodisperse with mean diameters of approximately 25 , sm. The changes in droplet size distributions with time are examined with a laser diffraction system for water volume fractions ranging from 0.001 to 0.1 and applied fields ranging from 52 to 520 kVm-1. The average droplet size increases exponentially with time; we examine the exponent's dependence on average field strength and droplet volume fraction.     

How hackers do it

We have no wish to frighten our readers, but here's a simple guide to some of the things hackers can do to access your system or network. Bet you didn't know there were so many ways to get in!     

Subcontinuations

Continuations have proven to be useful for implementing a variety of control structures, including exception handling facilities and breadth-first searching algorithms. However, traditional continuations are not useful in the presence of concurrency, because the notion of the rest of the computation represented by a continuation does not in general make sense. Traditional continuations can also be difficult to use in nonconcurrent settings, since their global nature is sometimes problematic. This article presents a new type of continuation, called asubcontinuation. Just as a traditional continuation represents the rest of a computation ¿from a given point in the computation, a subcontinuation represents the rest of asubcomputation ¿from a given point in the subcomputation. Subcontinuations may be used to control tree-structured concurrency by allowing nonlocal exits to arbitrary points in a process tree and allowing the capture of a subtree of a computation as a composable continuation for later use. In the absence of concurrency the localized control achievable with subcontinuations makes them more useful than traditional continuations.     

Assessing Environmental Risks: Lessons From Superfund

This essay analyzes the use of risk assessment in Superfund, the controversial American hazardous waste cleanup programme. We argue that risk assessment has been used in three ways in discussing policy options in this programme: as a metric for assessing performance; as a means for resolving conflicts; and as a tool for comparing different environmental initiatives. Use of risk reduction as an analytical tool in European efforts to clean up hazardous waste sites is discussed. We conclude that while risk assessment has potential utility for each of these applications, there are also accompanying technical and political difficulties.     

Isoforms p69 and p100 of 2'',5''-oligoadenylate synthetase induced differentially by interferons in vivo and in vitro

There is no better place to test life-saving resuscitation interventions than in the prehospital setting. Patients rarely survive cardiac arrest if resuscitation techniques have failed before leaving the scene. Also, paramedics are usually very experienced in key initial resuscitative techniques, and they routinely operate under strict paramilitary protocol, resulting in better study compliance. In addition, the large study populations that are derived from emergency medical services (EMS) systems lead to faster study completion and statistically stronger data. Most important, by reinforcing standardized care, rigidly scrutinized trials improve patient care, regardless of the effect of the study intervention. The success of productive EMS research centers requires routine communication between hospital and EMS administrators and their medical directors, designation of mutually acceptable data collectors who guarantee confidentiality, reciprocal exchange of study data provided as educational seminars to the hospitals, commitments to support the budget requests of an EMS program and appropriate system modifications, inclusion of EMS personnel in study design from the very beginning, prospective education of the medical community and media before protocol implementation, an authoritative grassroots medical director, and a paramedic supervisor system.