A Pedagogy of Play: Integrating Computer Games into the Writing Classroom

Traditional distinctions between work/play and classroom/gamespace create barriers to computer games’ integration into academic settings and the writing classroom in particular. For a writing class, the work/play distinction often relegates games to an object of analysis in which students critique the games but have little invested in the gameplay itself. After examining briefly how historical changes in education created these distinctions, we offer an alternative position that places play and gamespace within the realm of the classroom. In so doing, we open up a gap for computer game theory to inform the pedagogy that can be practiced in a writing classroom. We show one such example of game theory informing writing pedagogy—the theory of emergent gaming. We then offer an example of an enacted emergent pedagogy in which students play the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft throughout the term, composing self-determined, rhetorically focused writing projects informed by play and written for other game players.     

Media Convergence: Creating Content, Questioning Relationships

The development, dissemination, and proliferation of multimedia and media convergent texts raise a number of pressing questions for literacy scholars in general and compositionists in particular. What kinds of literacy practices are students developing through their use and composition of multimodal and new media texts? What genres are used in the creation of such texts, and why? Are there particular genres that are favored? How are older genres remediated or recast through media convergence? What research methodology challenges are posed when attempting to study multimodal and new media texts? How might compositionists use media convergence to teach students about academic literacies, about research, about the changing nature of “writing?” What might media convergence look like in the future? Perhaps most immediately, the phrase itself—“media convergence”—begs a question: what, exactly, is converging? This special issue of Computers and Composition on “Media Convergence” poses answers—sometimes tentative, sometimes provocative—to these questions.     

On delay-derivative-dependent stability of systems with fast-varying delays

Stability of linear systems with uncertain bounded time-varying delays is studied under the assumption that the nominal delay values are not equal to zero. An input-output approach to stability of such systems is known to be based on the bound of the L₂-norm of a certain integral operator. There exists a bound on this operator norm in two cases: in the case where the delay derivative is not greater than 1 and in the case without any constraints on the delay derivative. In the present note we fill the gap between the two cases by deriving a tight operator bound which is an increasing and continuous function of the delay derivative upper bound d?1. For d→∞ the new bound corresponds to the second case and improves the existing bound. As a result, for the first time, delay-derivative-dependent frequency domain and time domain stability criteria are derived for systems with the delay derivative greater than 1.     

Nonsmooth optimization for multiband frequency domain control design

Multiband frequency domain synthesis consists in the minimization of a finite family of closed-loop transfer functions on prescribed frequency intervals. This is an algorithmically difficult problem due to its inherent nonsmoothness and nonconvexity. We extend our previous work on nonsmooth H_∞ synthesis to develop a nonsmooth optimization technique to compute local solutions to multiband synthesis problems. The proposed method is shown to perform well on illustrative examples.     

Verification and validation of Bayesian knowledge-bases

Knowledge-base V&V primarily addresses the question: “Does my knowledge-base contain the right answer and can I arrive at it?” One of the main goals of our work is to properly encapsulate the knowledge representation and allow the expert to work with manageable-sized chunks of the knowledge-base. This work develops a new methodology for the verification and validation of Bayesian knowledge-bases that assists in constructing and testing such knowledge-bases. Assistance takes the form of ensuring that the knowledge is syntactically correct, correcting “imperfect” knowledge, and also identifying when the current knowledge-base is insufficient as well as suggesting ways to resolve this insufficiency. The basis of our approach is the use of probabilistic network models of knowledge. This provides a framework for formally defining and working on the problems of uncertainty in the knowledge-base.

In this paper, we examine the project which is concerned with assisting a human expert to build knowledge-based systems under uncertainty. We focus on how verification and validation are currently achieved in .     

工业循环冷却水处理药剂阻垢性能实验的探讨

通过实验对比,得出实验温度、实验时间及浓缩倍数对水处理药剂阻垢率的影响,筛选出显著影响因素,用于指导阻垢剂的选择及性能的鉴定。     

Computer mediated communication for social and academic purposes: Profiles of use and University students’ gratifications

The present study approaches the Internet as a social space, where university students make use of computer mediated communication (CMC) applications, i.e. e-mail, instant messaging and social network sites, in order to satisfy social and academic needs. We focus on university students, because they represent one of the most avid groups of CMC users and additionally, because they are expected to carry their perceptions of media with them into the work place and their social life. In order to investigate this issue, we conducted an empirical research using, as a target group, a sample of students from a specific Greek University. Grounded in the “uses and gratifications” perspective, we investigated the various profiles of CMC use by students along with (a) the students’ perceptions about social and academic usefulness of CMC applications, (b) the extent up to which these perceptions are correlated with students’ prior experience with the use of CMC applications, and (c) how both of these factors can predict the frequency of present use of CMC for social or academic purposes respectively. The results reveal that although these three CMC applications constitute “functional alternatives” (media that satisfy similar needs) they are different to the degree of their “functionality” for the gratification of social and academic needs. Furthermore, the degree of CMC use by students is not correlated with the years of CMC experience, but with the profile of use that students dynamically adopt according to their daily needs and preferences. The results provide evidence for the current CMC use by university students and can be useful for the implementation of further academic policies regarding CMC use in Higher Education settings.     

Predictable service overlay networks: Predictability through adaptive monitoring and efficient overlay construction and management

Providing bounded communication among participating nodes is significant for distributed systems. Internet-based applications suffer with lower performance due to absence of bounded latency. We describe PSON, an overlay network solution to this challenging problem. PSON has two components. The monitoring component, SyncProbe, utilizes efficient and adaptive monitoring techniques to measure latency, detect packet loss, and provide real-time estimates of maximum expected latency along paths of an Internet substrate. The QoSMap component constructs and manages overlay such that it yields application-level QoS and provides resilience against network failures. A distinctive feature of QoSMap is construction of QoS-compliant backup paths which facilitate in overlay management and operation during the period when primary overlay paths violate QoS. We evaluate PSON on PlanetLab to provide predictable communication for applications with different topology and QoS requirement. Our experiments confirm the effectiveness of PSON in providing an inexpensive and efficient application-layer solution to Internet’s unpredictable behavior.     

Designing fast LTL model checking algorithms for many-core GPUs

Recent technological developments made various many-core hardware platforms widely accessible. These massively parallel architectures have been used to significantly accelerate many computation demanding tasks. In this paper, we show how the algorithms for LTL model checking can be redesigned in order to accelerate LTL model checking on many-core GPU platforms. Our detailed experimental evaluation demonstrates that using the NVIDIA CUDA technology results in a significant speedup of the verification process. Together with state space generation based on shared hash-table and DFS exploration, our CUDA accelerated model checker is the fastest among state-of-the-art shared memory model checking tools.