Exploiting indoor location and mobile information for context-awareness service

Personal mobile devices such as cellular phones, smart phones and PMPs have advanced incredibly in the past decade. The mobile technologies make research on the life log and user-context awareness feasible. In other words, sensors in mobile devices can collect the variety of user’s information, and various works have been conducted using that information. Most of works used a user’s location information as the most useful clue to recognize the user context. However, the location information in the conventional works usually depends on a GPS receiver that has limited function, because it cannot localize a person in a building and thus lowers the performance of the user-context awareness. This paper develops a system to solve such problems and to infer a user’s hidden information more accurately using Bayesian network and indoor-location information. Also, this paper presents a new technique for localization in a building using a decision tree and signals for the Wireless LAN because the decision tree has many advantages which outweigh other localization techniques.     

Finding the skills for tomorrow: Information literacy and museum information professionals

This paper presents results from 21 semi-structured interviews with museum information professionals who were asked about their experiences working with information resources, tools, and technologies in museums. The interviews were analyzed to develop an understanding of the information literacy skills of museum information professionals. This paper presents the results of this analysis, and discusses the state of information literacy in museums, and the increasing need for museum information professionals to possess information literacy skills. The results illustrate how information literacy is defined by information professionals in museums, and how perceptions of information literacy and its importance to museums have changed over time.     

Public memories and private tastes: The shifting definitions of museums and their visitors in the UK

There is no doubt that museums now operate in a distinctly different market to those of the past. Rottenberg [Rottenberg, B. (2002). Museums, information and the public sphere. Museum International, 54(4), 21-28] identifies the two major trends in museums in the latter years of the 20th century as being ‘the prevalence of a new market-orientated ideology that stressed the importance of revenue generation’ and ‘the introduction of new technologies that transfixed not only the museum profession, but also the world’. The main impact, which these and other changes have had is the revision of the museum into a setting for recreational experiences [Foley, M. and McPherson, G. (2000). Museums as leisure. International Journal of Heritage Studies 16(2), 161-174; Stephen, A. (2001). The contemporary museum and leisure: Recreation as a museum function. MuseumManagement and Curatorship 19(3), 297-308], rather than an educative one. This paper attempts to address some of these shifts in ideology and purpose.The main concern that museums face as they become more ‘recreation-focused’ is that they will lose what has long been believed to be their ‘integrity’, and thus stray from their original missions to preserve and educate, with critics suggesting that they may simply become arenas for pleasure rather than education.This paper concludes that in future, it seems inevitable that museums will become ‘hybrid places, combining recreation and learning, allowing visitors diversions from the intense stimuli of strolling through galleries and viewing multitudinous objects’ [Kotler, N. (2004). New ways of experiencing culture: the role of museums and marketing implications. Museum Management and Curatorship, 19(4), 417-425], with entertainment and education working together to fulfil the museum's mission. Museums need not be afraid of using entertainment, but should embrace it as a tool for learning, potentially attracting a wider and more diversified public.     

The role of cognitive competence in the art museum experience

The gap between the potential for works of art in museums to offer unique experiences, and the actual outcomes of visitor encounters, highlights the importance of the cultural competence of museum visitors. However, when applied to museum visiting, cultural competence should be primarily treated as perceptual and cognitive—one needs to exercise the perceptual activities that works of art require in order for a museum visit to register as some form of satisfying experience. The main part of the paper is devoted to discussion of some aspects of the perceptual basis of cultural competence required for perception of works of art—the problem of attention, the misplaced dichotomy of ‘museum viewing’ versus ‘everyday perception’, and the problem of defining the current cognitive style. It is argued that one of the greatest challenges to the museological profession is the problem of how to engage the complex issues of perception, vision and subjective experience more properly in the museological discourse, so that they can be reflected in theories of presentation and interpretation.     

课程目标:理解的视角——以有理数乘法运算为例

学生的理解水平、认知发展水平是制定课程目标的重要依据。只有厘清、界定了学生的实际理解水平,才能寻求、探查到一个多数人都能达到的目标层次,制定出适切的课程目标。以有理数乘法运算为例,学生对有理数乘法运算的理解具有层次性与有限性。由低到高,理解的三个水平为程序理解、直观理解、抽象理解。学生对有理数乘法运算的理解是非常有限的,原因在于知识的超验性与学生认知发展的层次性。对照义务教育课程标准发现,课程目标要求偏高,课程目标表述模糊。因而,课程目标需要基于学生的理解水平,具有层次性、明确性、适切性。     

Historical view of the influences of measurement and writing theories on the practice of writing assessment in the United States

The purpose of this study is to examine the interactions among measurement theories, writing theories, and writing assessments in the United States from an historical perspective. The assessment of writing provides a useful framework for examining how theories influence, and in some cases fail to influence actual practice. Two research traditions are described to classify measurement theories (test-score and scaling), and three research traditions are proposed for classifying writing theories (form, idea and content, and sociocultural context). The results of this study trace the impact of measurement and writing traditions on writing assessment practices within selected time periods during the 20th century in the United States. One of the major findings of this historical analysis is that measurement theory has had a strong influence on writing assessments, while writing theory has had minimal influence on writing assessments. We also found support for the idea that a new discipline of writing assessment has emerged. This new discipline combines multiple fields including the writing, composition, and measurement communities of scholars, and it has the potential to set the stage for the future of writing assessment in the 21st century.     

The accuracy of performance task scores after resolution of rater disagreement: A Monte Carlo study

When multiple raters score a writing sample, on occasion they will award discrepant scores. To report a single score to the examinee, some method of resolving those differences must be applied to the ratings before an operational score can be reported. Several forms of resolving score discrepancies have been described in the literature. Initial studies of the various methods, however, have demonstrated that decisions about student performance may differ depending on the resolution method applied. Thus, studies are needed to investigate the quality of the scores associated with each model. To study score quality associated with each model, we conducted a Monte Carlo study and varied the factors associated with scoring and resolution to determine the conditions under which a particular resolution method might be superior.     

The 2005 Benjamin Franklin medal in physics presented to Yoichiro Nambu

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2005 Benjamin Franklin medal in physics to Yoichiro Nambu for his seminal contributions which introduced the modern concept of broken symmetry to elementary particle physics, for his invention of the particle property called color which is the key to quark confinement, and for his ground-breaking work on the theory of string-like elementary particles.     

Characterizing the technology firm: An exploratory study

Technology firms occupy a central position in modern economies. They drive economic growth, productivity gains and have created new industries and innovative products.Many will agree that technology firms are distinguished from others in their emphasis on technological activities. Since this observation is too general, researchers suggested a variety of specific criteria and definitions. A number of definitions of technology firms appear in the literature but many are arbitrary and simplistic and none gained wide acceptance. Similarly, the number of characteristics suggested is large, reflecting a variety of perspectives and interests. In this case too no agreement exists as to which are the important ones. Also, many seem to be interrelated capturing different aspects of the same underlying concepts.This paper is concerned with the issue of definition and classification of technology firms. We demonstrate the usefulness of a different approach to the definition and classification problem. We rely on executives’ evaluations of their firms’ technology profile and level. An analysis of these evaluations reveals the underlying dimensions the executives used in making their judgments. We regard the dimensions we uncover as capturing the essence of technology firms and use them to classify the firms we study. The specific characteristics the executives used to evaluate their firms were derived from a systematic scan of the literature. Thus, the list represents the set of characteristics early researchers viewed as describing and defining technology firms. The connection to early work enhances our findings’ validity and lends some credence to our belief that the three dimensions we uncover (R&D activities which are closely associated with a set of organizational elements and market conditions, product strategy, and corporate culture) can be used by others to define technology firms and classify firms according to their technology level. In our study we use these three dimensions to classify the firms studied. We show that the commonly used practice of classifying firms as high and low technology according to the industry to which they belong is flawed.Our goal in this study is not to offer a “new” or “better” definition and characterization of technology firms or to offer the “best” approach to the generation of the classification criteria. Rather, we demonstrate here the usefulness of a different approach to the problem. While our approach does suffer from limitations it has important advantages. We hope future studies will confirm not only the usefulness of our approach but also the general applicability of the specific criteria we identify in this study.     

Limiting GPR in a two-layer soil model via genetic algorithms

In this paper, an optimum grounding grid that provides the conditions of GPR<E_touch and minimum cost in the structures of two-layer soil model is designed and the length of total conductor and the quantity of ground rod are calculated via Genetic Algorithms (GA). A new approach is presented for the calculation of total conductor length. At the same time, the subject regarding in which layer the ground conductors and rods that form the grounding grid in a substation are to be placed in two-layer soil is analysed using GA. With this as the goal, the depth of optimum grid burial is determined. Our study is compared with the design study for a two-layer soil model in the literature. As a result, the high performance of optimum grid design that is achieved using GA is emphasized by varied applications.