iPods in the Sauna or Kids These Days….

Abstract

Inter-play, an on-line index to plays in collections, anthologies and periodicals, provides easy access to the locations of printed plays by making citations for the location(s) of each play searchable by author and/or title. The process of converting the original card file play index into an electronic database available on the World Wide Web is described. The index has been designed to provide easy access to and broad coverage of available plays. New titles are added to the file on a regular basis, placing this Web publication squarely in the electronic journal arena.     

Preservice Teachers’ Understandings of the Relation Between a Fraction or Integer and Its Decimal Expansion: Strength and Stability of Belief

Abstract

In an earlier study of preservice elementary and middle school teachers’ beliefs about repeating decimals, Weller, Arnon, and Dubinsky (2009) reported on a comparison of the mathematical performance of 77 preservice teachers who completed an APOS-based instructional unit with 127 preservice teachers who completed traditional instruction. The purpose of the current study, based on 47 interviews conducted 4 months after the instruction, during which time there was no further instruction on this topic, is to determine the strength and stability (over time) of the students’ beliefs, to uncover thinking that did not arise in the earlier study, and to see whether the interviews yield similar comparative results. The interviews did uncover changes in student thinking. The students who received the APOS-based instruction developed stronger and more stable (over time) beliefs that a repeating decimal is a number; a repeating decimal has a fraction or integer to which it corresponds; a repeating decimal in general equals its corresponding fraction or integer; and, in particular, In addition, a number of indices and categories were developed that may prove useful in other studies consisting of the comparison of interview and questionnaire data involving a large number of interview subjects.     

Structural testing for message‐passing concurrent programs: an extended test model

Developing high‐quality, error‐free message‐passing concurrent programs is not trivial. Although a number of different primitives with associated semantics are available to assist such development, they often increase the complexity of the testing process. In this paper, we extend our previous test model for message‐passing programs and present new structural testing criteria, taking into account additional features used in this paradigm, such as collective communication, non‐blocking sends, distinct semantics for non‐blocking receives, and persistent operations. Our new model also recognizes that sender primitives cannot always be matched with every receive primitive. This improvement allows us to remove statically a significant number of infeasible synchronization edges that would otherwise have to be analyzed later by the tester. In this paper, the test model is presented using the Message‐Passing Interface standard; however, our new model has been designed to be flexible, and it can be configured to support a range of different message‐passing environments or languages. We have carried out case studies showing the applicability of the new test model to represent message‐passing programs and also to reveal errors, mainly those errors related to inter‐process communication. In addition to increasing the number of features supported by the test model, we have also reduced the overall cost of testing significantly. Our case studies suggest that the number of synchronization edges can be reduced by up to 93%, mainly by eliminating infeasible edges between unmatchable communication primitives. The main contribution of the paper is to present a more flexible test model that provides improved coverage for message‐passing programs and at the same time reduces the cost of testing significantly. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Professional Program Criteria for Civil Engineering Curriculums

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has adopted a revised set of accreditation criteria that is designed to ensure that graduates of accredited programs are prepared to enter the practice of engineering. The proposal also specifies that engineering programs must demonstrate that their graduates have an understanding of professional practice issues in addition to proficiency in specific subject areas that are tabulated in the civil engineering program criteria. The findings of this study indicate that engineering undergraduate and graduate students as well as practitioners perceive that four subject areas are of great importance for civil engineers. They include structural engineering, hydraulics∕hydrology∕water resources, engineering design, and mathematics through calculus and differential equations. In contrast, one area, chemistry, received lower ratings. The data suggest that the majority of subjects included in the civil engineering program criteria are considered by students and practitioners to have generally the same level of importance and should be included in the curriculum at an above average level. In particular, 81% of the subject areas included in the ABET civil engineering program criteria are rated by both students and practitioners with a composite score ≥3.1. This may be interpreted as strong support for the Engineering Criteria 2000 program requirements.     

The dynamics of daily events and well-being across cultures: When less is more.

The authors examined cultural and individual differences in the relation between daily events and daily satisfaction. In a preliminary study, they established cross-cultural equivalence of 50 daily events. In the main study, participants in the United States, Korea, and Japan completed daily surveys on the 50 events and daily satisfaction for 21 days. The multilevel random coefficient model analyses showed that (a) the within-person association between positive events and daily satisfaction was significantly stronger among Asian American, Korean, and Japanese participants than among European American participants and (b) the within-person association between positive events and daily satisfaction was significantly weaker among individuals high in global life satisfaction than among those low in global life satisfaction. The findings demonstrate a weaker effect of positive events on daily well-being among individuals and cultures high in global well-being. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Compliant cryptologic protocols

Literally, the word compliance suggests conformity in fulfilling official requirements. This paper presents the results of the analysis and design of a class of protocols called compliant cryptologic protocols (CCPs). The paper presents a notion for compliance in cryptosystems that is conducive as a cryptologic goal. CCPs are employed in security systems used by at least two mutually mistrusting sets of entities. The individuals in the sets of entities only trust the design of the security system and any trusted third party the security system may include. Such a security system can be thought of as a broker between the mistrusting sets of entities. Published online: 15 November 2002     

Types and associated type families for hardware simulation and synthesis

In this article we overview the design and implementation of the second generation of Kansas Lava. Driven by the needs and experiences of implementing telemetry decoders and other circuits, we have made a number of improvements to both the external API and the internal representations used. We have retained our dual shallow/deep representation of signals in general, but now have a number of externally visible abstractions for combinatorial and sequential circuits, and enabled signals. We introduce these abstractions, as well as our abstractions for reading and writing memory. Internally, we found the need to represent unknown values inside our circuits, so we made aggressive use of associated type families to lift our values to allow unknowns, in a principled and regular way. We discuss this design decision, how it unfortunately complicates the internals of Kansas Lava, and how we mitigate this complexity. Finally, when connecting Kansas Lava to the real world, the standardized idiom of using named input and output ports is provided by Kansas Lava using a new monad, called Fabric. We present the design of this Fabric monad, and illustrate its use in a small but complete example.     

A Social Robot that Stands in Line

Recent research in mobile robot navigation make it feasible to utilize autonomous robots in service fields. But, such applications require more than just navigation. To operate in a peopled environment, robots should recognize and act according to human social behavior. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of one such social behavior: a robot that stands in line much as people do. The system employs stereo vision to recognize lines of people, and uses the concept of personal space for modeling the social behavior. Personal space is used both to detect the end of a line and to determine how much space to leave between the robot and the person in front of it. Our model of personal space is based on measurements from people forming lines. We demonstrate our ideas with a mobile robot navigation system that can purchase a cup of coffee, even if people are waiting in line for service.     

Discipline-based instruction to promote interdisciplinary design of wearable and pervasive computing products

This paper reports on a design experience for undergraduates in computer engineering, industrial design, and marketing that focuses on pervasive computing devices. Across a broad range of targeted application areas and user groups, many of the student designs have been wearable computers. Consequently, our course will be of interest to the wearable computing community, particularly in terms of our aim of bridging the gap between design and engineering. For the two most recent offerings of the course, we have utilized external observers and surveyed the students in order to validate the impact of aspects of our process and changes to it. This paper is based upon 5 years of experience and 2 years of analysis of our course, and it presents an overview of our process with both qualitative and quantitative results from these two most recent offerings.