Requirements for electronic note taking systems: A field study of note taking in university classrooms

Note taking is the core activity for students in a classroom. There has been a large amount of research conducted, both from industry and from academia, into facilitating the note-taking process. There is evidence that shows that note taking can be beneficial for the students’ educational growth. There are also many available systems for taking notes electronically (e.g. Tablet PCs, PDAs). However, what has not been given as much attention is how these electronic devices affect (or support) the note taking task. In this paper, we study university students’ current note taking behavior and the changes caused by the use of electronic systems for this activity. The goal of our work is to identify issues that should be considered when evaluating electronic note taking systems and to formulate requirements for future electronic note-taking systems. Our findings show that while the technological support for writing with pens on electronic surfaces is quite advanced, the task of note taking in the classroom is not well supported. We identify the limitations of typical note taking systems and discuss the implications for the design of future note taking systems. Our work consisted of three parts: a survey of current note-taking practices, an observational study in a classroom environment, and a semester long case study of students using electronic note-taking devices. All of these activities took place at a large 4-year university. We found that the people reacted to note-taking devices very differently and that their current practices were not always well supported. The users all wanted to input information as fast as possible, in the manner they wanted but they were not always able to achieve that. Hardware limitations (i.e. screen size, responsiveness) added to this issue. We also found that the features that are well supported in an electronic medium (i.e. modification, reorganizing, multiple pen colors/styles, handwriting recognition, sharing) were not commonly used or wanted.     

Using the Web as corpus for self-training text categorization

Most current methods for automatic text categorization are based on supervised learning techniques and, therefore, they face the problem of requiring a great number of training instances to construct an accurate classifier. In order to tackle this problem, this paper proposes a new semi-supervised method for text categorization, which considers the automatic extraction of unlabeled examples from the Web and the application of an enriched self-training approach for the construction of the classifier. This method, even though language independent, is more pertinent for scenarios where large sets of labeled resources do not exist. That, for instance, could be the case of several application domains in different non-English languages such as Spanish. The experimental evaluation of the method was carried out in three different tasks and in two different languages. The achieved results demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of the proposed method.     

Spatial differences in the quality of university patenting: Do regions matter?

This paper uses patent citation data to analyze the quality of university technology across European regions. The empirical analysis draws on a panel dataset of 4580 European university-owned patents classified by 202 European regions over the period 1998-2004. The methodology involves a multilevel framework to identify the effects of factors at three hierarchical levels (individual, university, and regional) on the quality of university patenting. The results suggest that regional factors, such as the level of development, industrial potential, and regional higher education R&D expenditure, do not play any significant role in determining the quality of European university patents. We instead find that the factors affecting patent quality stem from their specific characteristics. We also find that university size does not explain the quality of patents. However, there is significant unobserved heterogeneity at the university level in all models, suggesting that differences in other university characteristics explain a substantial part of the variance in patent quality.     

Self-efficacy beliefs and the relation between career planning and perception of barriers

This study tested the hypothesis that self-efficacy in career roles moderates the relation between perception of career barriers and career planning, in a study with Portuguese students, 488 in Grade 9 and 517 in Grade 12. The results supported the hypothesis only among Grade 9 girls, showing that perception of career barriers leads to less career planning among girls low in self-efficacy. The findings suggest that variables such as gender and psychological maturity need to be considered in understanding career planning.     

Epistemic constraint and teaching style

An experimental study investigated the influence of informational dependence on information appropriation as a function of epistemic authority’s styles. In a 2×2 design, university students were informed that acknowledging epistemic dependence was related either to academic success or to academic failure, and were exposed to controversial information from an epistemic authority that used either an authoritarian or a democratic style. The main dependent variable was the extent to which participants appropriated the controversial information. Firstly the results showed that students were more inclined to admit that their own academic competence depended on the information delivered by the teachers when epistemic dependence was related to success rather than to failure. Secondly, the admittance of dependence had a different impact on information appropriation according to the authority’s style. Admittance increased appropriation under a democratic style whereas it decreased appropriation under an authoritarian style.     

Moderate-to-vigorous physical activity,executive functions and prefrontal brain oxygenation in children: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

Despite accumulating evidence that regular exercise improves executive functioning, the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms have rarely been investigated. The present study aimed to compare cognitive performance as well as task-specific concentration changes in oxygenated haemoglobin in the prefrontal cortex between children with higher and lower moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). Physical activity was measured over 7 consecutive days using actigraphy. Afterwards, participants (N = 50) completed verbal fluency tests (VFTs) and mental arithmetic (MA) for the assessment of cognitive flexibility and working memory capacity. During the tasks, changes of oxygenated haemoglobin were measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Using average MVPA of 11-year-old children as cut-point, the sample was divided into children with lower and higher MVPA. Analyses of variance revealed no significant differences in correct and false responses on the cognitive tests between groups. With regard to oxygenated haemoglobin, no group differences were found for concentration changes in response to the cognitive tasks. In conclusion, VFTs and MA increased children’s activation in prefrontal regions associated with cognitive flexibility and working memory, respectively. However, these executive functions and cortical activation were not different between children with lower and higher MVPA.     

Mixed order robust adaptive control for general linear time invariant systems

We provide a solution to the adaptive control problem of an unknown linear system of a given derivation order, using a reference model or desired poles defined in a possibly different derivation order and employing continuous adjustment of parameters ruled by possibly another different derivation order. To this purpose, we present an extension for the fractional settings of the Bezout’s lemma and gradient steepest descent adjustment. We analyze both the direct and indirect approaches to adaptive control. We discuss some robustness advantages/disadvantages of the fractional adjustment of parameters in comparison with the integer one and, through simulations, the possibility to define optimal derivation order controllers.     

Segmentation of Cinema Audiences: An Exploratory Study Applied to Young Consumers

The cinema exhibition sector in Spain, as well as in the rest of Europe, is a dynamic sector characterised by the present growth of multiplexes and consumer demand after a long period of decline. These changes make it relevant to analyse the cinema attendees' profile from a marketing perspective. To this end, we have developed an exploratory study on segmentation applied to the young cinema attendees. Doing so, we have found three different groups according to benefits sought in their going to the cinema and other demographic and behavioural variables. On the basis of information as such, specific marketing objectives could be set and more efficient strategies designed and implemented.     

Certain Changes to Training Companies Due to Social Web Development

Companies use many different marketing strategies in order to make their products known and place their corporate images and brandings in the market. Besides, nowadays, being on the Intemet is a must for every company striving for success. The development and implementation of Web 2.0 or social web are threatening the basis of the ways of mixing with other people. A company devoted to open and distance learning, such as Master-D Corporation, a clear example of how a proper and planned use of the different possibilities offered by the Web 2.0, based on blogs, allows a company to achieve bigger market shares and brand positioning following the win-win principle. Blogs are, undoubtedly, channels of communication that prove the power of attraction of good information. These changes are affecting everybody and, in particular, companies and institutions related to people＇s education, teaching and training for their inclusion in society and labor market. This essay brings up some reflections in two ways： The first one deals with some reasons why education is also related to the concept of ＂company＂; and the second one deals with how these changes generated by Web 2.0 are affecting some training companies, represented in this case by Master-D,