Students using posters as a means of communication and assessment

Poster sessions are widely used as a medium for the communication of results by professionals at conferences and by students to their peers. The authors have introduced poster sessions into undergraduate mathematical modelling courses. This has given our students an interesting and challenging task and it has caused us to devise a scheme for the assessment of posters.This paper surveys the use of poster sessions with undergraduates, outlines the rationale for using posters with mathematics students, describes our experiences and proposes criteria to use in the assessment of student posters.     

Blocking in landmark-based search in honeybees

Two experiments tested blocking in landmark-based search in honeybees. Honeybees in the experimental group were trained in Phase 1 with a single landmark in a constant spatial relation to the target (sugar water). In the compound training second phase, the landmark used in Phase 1 (blocking landmark) and a new landmark (blocked landmark) were presented at constant spatial relations to the target. The blocking and blocked landmarks differed from each other in color and position, and the blocking landmark retained the same spatial relationship to the target as in Phase 1. In Experiment 1, the control group experienced only Phase 2 training with two landmarks. In Experiment 2, the control group was trained with a different landmark in a different position in Phase 1. Blocking was found in both cases.     

Motor control and sequencing of boys with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) during computer game play

The motor control of 49 unmedicated boys clinically diagnosed with ADHD, case‐matched with 49 non‐ADHD boys, was assessed while playing Crash Bandicoot I, a Sony^TM Playstation platform computer video game. In Crash Bandicoot participants control the movements of a small‐animated figure through a hazardous jungle environment. Operationally defined measures of motor control were designated by (1) the stage of the game completed (ie, the number of obstacles successfully passed) before losing the figure's ‘life’, (2) the level of complexity that the stage represented and (3) the time taken to get to that point during the video game play. These measures were assessed under contrasting conditions of low or high working memory and distracter loads. Four tasks were administered (totalling 12 trials), incorporating both with and without distracter conditions. For those trials with the distracter, a segment of the television show The Simpsons was simultaneously played on a television screen adjacent to the computer game monitor. A 5‐way MANOVA revealed that ADHD boys took less time to complete their trials under the direct condition (ie, no working memory load) on Crash Bandicoot, compared to their matched non‐ADHD peers. When the task required additional working memory, however, the ADHD boys took significantly longer. Cumulative frequency plots of game performance revealed that in terms of the number of obstacles completed, the control participants successfully navigated more obstacles on the low working memory load task than the ADHD participants, but that the performance of the two groups was less distinguishable on the high working memory load task. The findings have implications for assessment and management of children with ADHD.     

Qualitative evaluation of automatic assignment of keywords to images

In image retrieval, most systems lack user-centred evaluation since they are assessed by some chosen ground truth dataset. The results reported through precision and recall assessed against the ground truth are thought of as being an acceptable surrogate for the judgment of real users. Much current research focuses on automatically assigning keywords to images for enhancing retrieval effectiveness. However, evaluation methods are usually based on system-level assessment, e.g. classification accuracy based on some chosen ground truth dataset. In this paper, we present a qualitative evaluation methodology for automatic image indexing systems. The automatic indexing task is formulated as one of image annotation, or automatic metadata generation for images. The evaluation is composed of two individual methods. First, the automatic indexing annotation results are assessed by human subjects. Second, the subjects are asked to annotate some chosen images as the test set whose annotations are used as ground truth. Then, the system is tested by the test set whose annotation results are judged against the ground truth. Only one of these methods is reported for most systems on which user-centred evaluation are conducted. We believe that both methods need to be considered for full evaluation. We also provide an example evaluation of our system based on this methodology. According to this study, our proposed evaluation methodology is able to provide deeper understanding of the system’s performance.     

Multiple audience rating form strategies for student evaluation of college teaching

Michael Scriven has suggested that student rating forms, for the purpose of evaluating college teaching, be designed for multiple audiences (instructor, administrator, student), and with a single global item for summative functions (determination of merit, retention, or promotion). This study reviewed approaches to rating form construction, e.g., factor analytic strategies of Marsh, and recommended the multiple audience design of Scriven. An empirical test of the representativeness of the single global item was reported from an analysis of 1,378 forms collected in a university department of education. The global item correlated most satisfactorily with other items, a computed total of items, items that represented underlying factors, and various triplets of items selected to represent all possible combinations of items. It was concluded that a multiple audience rating form showed distinct advantages in design and that the single global item most fairly and highly represented the overall teaching performance, as judged by students, for decisions about retention, promotion, and merit made by administrators.     

基于工作流的网络协同办公系统的研究与实现

本文首先对办公自动化(OA)的国内外研究现状及发展趋势做了分析和研究,同时也是对网络协同工作(CSCW)的诸多关键技术进行了论述,着重研究了工作流技术在办公自动化中应用,最后以公文流转工作流程为一个典型实例,实现了基于工作流的网络协同办公系统的基本功能。     

Use of stochastic simulations to investigate the power and design of a whole genome association study using single nucleotide

This paper presents a quick, easy to implement and versatile way of using stochastic simulations to investigate the power and design of using single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays for genome-wide association studies in farm animals. It illustrates the methodology by discussing a small example where 6 experimental designs are considered to analyse the same resource consisting of 6006 animals with pedigree and phenotypic records: (1) genotyping the 30 most widely used sires in the population and all of their progeny (515 animals in total), (2) genotyping the 100 most widely used sires in the population and all of their progeny (1 102 animals in total), genotyping respectively (3) 515 and (4) 1 102 animals selected randomly or genotyping respectively (5) 515 and (6) 1 102 animals from the tails of the phenotypic distribution. Given the resource at hand, designs where the extreme animals are genotyped perform the best, followed by designs selecting animals at random. Designs where sires and their progeny are genotyped perform the worst, as even genotyping the 100 most widely used sires and their progeny is not as powerful of genotyping 515 extreme animals.