A new design method based on artificial bee colony algorithm for digital IIR filters

Digital filters can be broadly classified into two groups: recursive (infinite impulse response (IIR)) and non-recursive (finite impulse response (FIR)). An IIR filter can provide a much better performance than the FIR filter having the same number of coefficients. However, IIR filters might have a multi-modal error surface. Therefore, a reliable design method proposed for IIR filters must be based on a global search procedure. Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm has been recently introduced for global optimization. The ABC algorithm simulating the intelligent foraging behaviour of honey bee swarm is a simple, robust, and very flexible algorithm. In this work, a new method based on ABC algorithm for designing digital IIR filters is described and its performance is compared with that of a conventional optimization algorithm (LSQ-nonlin) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm.     

Ranking of field association terms using Co-word analysis

Information retrieval involves finding some desired information in a store of information or a database. In this paper, Co-word analysis will be used to achieve a ranking of a selected sample of FA terms. Based on this ranking a better arranging of search results can be achieved. Experimental results achieved using 41 MB of data (7660 documents) in the field of sports. The corpus was collected from CNN newspaper, sports field. This corpus was chosen to be distributed over 11 sub-fields of the field sports from the experimental results, the average precision increased by 18.3% after applying the proposed arranging scheme depending on the absolute frequency to count the terms weights, and the average precision increased by 17.2% after applying the proposed arranging scheme depending on a formula based on “TF∗IDF” to count the terms weights.     

Patrick Geddes and Museum ideas in Dundee and Beyond

One of the first things Patrick Geddes did on taking up the post of Professor of Botany at University College, Dundee was to establish a botanical museum. Throughout his life museums were of great importance to him, and were central to his theories as an educationalist. The Outlook Tower in Edinburgh was the most famous demonstration of these theories, but this short introductory paper also looks at less well known aspects of them, such as his ground-breaking paper to the Museums Association conference in Dundee in 1907, his unpublished book.

Museums

Actual and Possible, and his attempts to win the directorship of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art.     

25 Years of Cooperation in Polymer Science:Looking Back and Forward

My feeling is that we are on a good road,which has its origin in the history of our interaction, and leads straight ahead, into a new quality of research culture, resting on a sound basis of mutual trust and friendship.     

Agency problem, institutions, and technology policy: Explaining Taiwan's semiconductor industry development

Taiwan has made significant progress in the semiconductor industry with government agencies and bureaucrats as the driving forces over the past 30 years. Taiwan's impressive achievement in the semiconductor industry clearly indicates that the government failures and agency problem usually associated with deep government involvement did not occur in Taiwan. Why is that the case? This paper proposes a principal-agent framework for technology policy and applies the framework to discuss the institutional arrangements through which bureaucrats were controlled effectively in executing the semiconductor industry policies in Taiwan. By analyzing the institutional and organizational arrangements Taiwanese leaders made to mitigate the agency problem, this paper brings bureaucrats into the popular developmental state theory and emphasizes that the success of state intervention should not be taken for granted, and it also brings politics into technology policy analysis and stresses the importance and complexity of agency problem in technology policy.     

The 2001 Benjamin Franklin medal in physics presented to Alan Guth, Ph.D. of Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2001 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics to Alan H. Guth for his efforts to advance our knowledge of physical science and its application of the inflationary scenario, in which the universe undergoes a rapid expansion in the first stages of the Big Bang.     

CURIOSITY AND EXPLORATORY BEHAVIOUR IN ABILITY DEVELOPMENT

Effective diagnosis and appropriate fostering of giftedness require accurate knowledge of the nature and course of intellectual development. However, psychological theories developed until now have not paid sufficient attention to the influence of children on their own development. The study reported here shows that cognitively gifted children who display well developed exploratory behaviour interact with their environment in an active way. Confidence in exploring the environment, which children acquire as a result of favourable social processes, facilitates the emergence of problem solving behaviour. As a result, such children are able to expand their cognitive abilities independently on the basis of their own activity. The task for educators is to promote exploratory behaviour and systematically expand the child's repertoire of behaviours through the application of appropriate interaction strategies.     

Beyond hype and underestimation: identifying research challenges for the future of MOOCs

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have generated enthusiasm, excitement, and hype worldwide and recently increasing skepticism. They are being broadly discussed in the major news media (and to a smaller extent in academic circles). Rapidly increasing numbers of MOOC providers, MOOC courses and articles, discussion groups, and blogs discussing MOOCs are indicators of the involvement of many stakeholders. Most of these analyses and developments are based on economic perspectives (such as scalability, productivity, and being free) and technology perspectives (including platforms supporting large number of students in online environments, enrichment components such as forums, peer-to-peer learning support, and automatic grading). Few contributions analyze MOOCs from a learning science perspective and put them into a larger context with other approaches to learning and education. This commentary explores challenges derived from the perspective to conceptualize MOOCs as being one component in a rich landscape of learning.