Development and evaluation of a virtual campus on Second Life: The case of SecondDMI

Video games and new communication metaphors are quickly changing today’s young people habits. Considering the actual e-learning scenarios, embedded in a fully technological enabled environment it is crucial to take advantage of this kind of capabilities to let learning process gain best results.     

Leukaemias and cancers following iodine-131 administration for thyroid cancer

We studied 1771 patients treated for a thyroid cancer in two institutions. None of these patients had been treated with external radiotherapy and 1497 had received (131)I. The average (131)I cumulative activity administered was 7.2 GBq, and the estimated average dose was 0.34 Sv to the bone marrow and 0.80 Sv to the whole body. After a mean follow-up of 10 years, no case of leukaemia was observed, compared with 2.5 expected according to the coefficients derived from Japanese atomic bomb survivors (P = 0.1). A total of 80 patients developed a solid second malignant neoplasm (SMN), among whom 13 developed a colorectal cancer. The risk of colorectal cancer was found to be related to the total activity of (131)I administered 5 years or more before its diagnosis (excess relative risk = 0.5 per GBq, P = 0.02). These findings were probably caused by the accumulation of (131)I in the colon lumen. Hence, in the absence of laxative treatment, the dose to the colon as a result of (131)I administered for the treatment of thyroid cancer could be higher than expected from calculation of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). When digestive tract cancers were excluded, the overall excess relative risk of second cancer per estimated effective sievert received to the whole body was -0.2 (P = 0.6).     

Enzyme-Containing Paints Inhibit the Growth of Marine Microorganisms

A new strategy to prevent the biofouling of water-submerged surfaces is presented here. In particular, the authors showthat carbonic anydrase from Methanosarcina thermophila can be entrapped into polyacrylic paints, preserving enzyme activity. In addition, the authors also show that enzyme-containing paints inhibit the growth of marine microorganims, preventing biofouling.     

Long-term behavior of operational amplifiers

The voltage and current offsets of two typical precision operational amplifiers (OPAs) with BJT and FET input, respectively, were continuously measured for two years. The paper presents the experiment, explains the method of data analysis, and discusses the results. The long-term stability turns out to be limited mainly by random walk processes     

A 13-b 1.1-MHz oversampled DAC with semidigital reconstruction filtering

A digital-to-analog converter (DAC) composed of a cascaded digital /spl Sigma//spl Delta/ modulator and the combination of a semidigital/digital finite-impulse response (FIR) and an infinite-impulse response (IIR)-SC/RC filter is described. The architecture enables the analog linear reconstruction of 16/spl times/ oversampled digital signals. With the analog section implemented in CMOS 0.18-/spl mu/m and the digital part programmed into a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), the modulator plus reconstruction filter achieves a peak SNR of 78 dB. The spurious-free dynamic range reaches 80 dB and stays better than 73 dB within the 1.104-MHz signal band. A missing-tone-power ratio of 70 dB, demonstrated for a signal with 15-dB peak-to-average ratio, proves that the solution is suitable for ADSL-CO transmitters.     

Special issue on information visualisation

Multimedia Tools and Applications -     

Migrating legacy video lectures to multimedia learning objects

Video lectures are an old distance learning approach that offers only basic interaction and retrieval features to the user. Thus, to follow the new learning paradigms, we need to re‐engineer the e‐learning processes while preserving the investments made in the past. In this paper we present an approach for migrating video lectures to multimedia learning objects. Two essential problems are tackled: the detection of slide transitions and the generation of the learning objects. To this aim, the video of the lecture is scanned to detect the slide changes, while the learning object metadata and the slide pictures are extracted from the presentation document. A tool named VLMigrator (video lecture migrator) has been developed to support the migration of video lectures and the restructuring of their contents in terms of learning objects. Both the migration strategy and the tool have been experimented in a case study. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Development and evaluation of a system enhancing Second Life to support synchronous role‐based collaborative learning

Research and commercial interest toward 3D virtual worlds are recently growing because they probably represent the new direction for the next generation of web applications. Although these environments present several features that are useful for informal collaboration, structured collaboration is required to effectively use them in a working or in a didactical setting. This paper presents a system supporting synchronous collaborative learning by naturally enriching Learning Management System services with meeting management and multimedia features. Monitoring and moderation of discussions are also managed at a single group and at the teaching level. The Second Life (SL) environment has been integrated with two ad hoc developed Moodle plug‐ins and SL objects have been designed, modeled, and programmed to support synchronous role‐based collaborative activities. We also enriched SL with tools to support the capturing and displaying of textual information during collaborative sessions for successive retrieval. In addition, the multimedia support has been enhanced with functionalities for navigating multimedia contents. We also report on an empirical study aiming at evaluating the use of the proposed SL collaborative learning as compared with face‐to‐face group collaboration. Results show that the two approaches are statistically undistinguishable in terms of performance, comfort with communication, and overall satisfaction. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.