A Cooperative Development System for an Interactive Introductory Programming Course

We present a system for a cooperative development of computer programs that was created for the lab sessions of an introductory programming course at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The system relieved the students from the tedious task of retyping programs developed by the teaching assistant and enabled them to cooperate with the teaching assistant in solving programming problems. We thus made the lab sessions more efficient and interactive and brought them closer to the spirit of active learning approaches

Job Market Signalling and Screening: An Experimental Comparison

We analyze the Spence education game in experimental markets.We compare a signaling and a screening variant, and we analyze the e®ect of increasing the number of employers from two to three.In all treatments, there is a strong tendency to separate.More efficient workers invest more often and employers bid higher for workers who have invested.More efficient workers also earn higher wages.Employers' pro¯ts are usually not different from zero.Increased competition leads to higher wages only in the signaling sessions.We ¯nd that workers in the screening sessions invest more often and earn higher wages when there are two employers.labour market;games

An Authentication Protocol for Future Sensor Networks

Authentication is one of the essential security services in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for ensuring secure data sessions. Sensor node authentication ensures the confidentiality and validity of data collected by the sensor node, whereas user authentication guarantees that only legitimate users can access the sensor data. In a mobile WSN, sensor and user nodes move across the network and exchange data with multiple nodes, thus experiencing the authentication process multiple times. The integration of WSNs with Internet of Things (IoT) brings forth a new kind of WSN architecture along with stricter security requirements; for instance, a sensor node or a user node may need to establish multiple concurrent secure data sessions. With concurrent data sessions, the frequency of the re-authentication process increases in proportion to the number of concurrent connections, which makes the security issue even more challenging. The currently available authentication protocols were designed for the autonomous WSN and do not account for the above requirements. In this paper, we present a novel, lightweight and efficient key exchange and authentication protocol suite called the Secure Mobile Sensor Network (SMSN) Authentication Protocol. In the SMSN a mobile node goes through an initial authentication procedure and receives a re-authentication ticket from the base station. Later a mobile node can use this re-authentication ticket when establishing multiple data exchange sessions and/or when moving across the network. This scheme reduces the communication and computational complexity of the authentication process. We proved the strength of our protocol with rigorous security analysis and simulated the SMSN and previously proposed schemes in an automated protocol verifier tool. Finally, we compared the computational complexity and communication cost against well-known authentication protocols.Comment: This article is accepted for the publication in "Sensors" journal. 29 pages, 15 figure

Brief mindfulness training enhances cognitive control in socioemotional contexts: Behavioral and neural evidence.

In social contexts, the dynamic nature of others' emotions places unique demands on attention and emotion regulation. Mindfulness, characterized by heightened and receptive moment-to-moment attending, may be well-suited to meet these demands. In particular, mindfulness may support more effective cognitive control in social situations via efficient deployment of top-down attention. To test this, a randomized controlled study examined effects of mindfulness training (MT) on behavioral and neural (event-related potentials [ERPs]) responses during an emotional go/no-go task that tested cognitive control in the context of emotional facial expressions that tend to elicit approach or avoidance behavior. Participants (N = 66) were randomly assigned to four brief (20 min) MT sessions or to structurally equivalent book learning control sessions. Relative to the control group, MT led to improved discrimination of facial expressions, as indexed by d-prime, as well as more efficient cognitive control, as indexed by response time and accuracy, and particularly for those evidencing poorer discrimination and cognitive control at baseline. MT also produced better conflict monitoring of behavioral goal-prepotent response tendencies, as indexed by larger No-Go N200 ERP amplitudes, and particularly so for those with smaller No-Go amplitude at baseline. Overall, findings are consistent with MT's potential to enhance deployment of early top-down attention to better meet the unique cognitive and emotional demands of socioemotional contexts, particularly for those with greater opportunity for change. Findings also suggest that early top-down attention deployment could be a cognitive mechanism correspondent to the present-oriented attention commonly used to explain regulatory benefits of mindfulness more broadly

Local Outcomes of a National Pilot to Enhance Ambulatory Precepting

Recruiting and retaining effective ambulatory preceptors in Family Medicine is a national priority (1), and the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) and the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) have developed a collaborative program to enhance Family Medicine Precepting (2). As one of the first cohort of pilot sites participating in the Preceptor Improvement Project (PIP), VCU\u27s Department of Family Medicine and Population Health developed a faculty development program to enhance clinical teaching at the Hayes E. Willis Health Center, one of the Department\u27s key teaching locations. The PIP content was based on the learning needs identified by faculty at HEWHC, and consisted of four, 90-minute sessions which focused on time-efficient precepting, feedback, and working with challenging learners. Overall, these sessions were deemed by the participants to be effective, and precpetor self-assessment of their abilities improved following the sessions. This collaboration between the ABFM and the STFM allowed the participating physicians to satisfy their ABFM Maintenance of Certification (MoC) quality improvement requirement. The Department\u27s experience with this effective approach to faculty development opens the opportunity to expand participation in the PIP to community faculty members, and to further enhance the teaching these preceptors provide as part of the Family Medicine clerkship. This PIP may also be a model for other departments seeking to enhance teaching effectiveness, both in the inpatient and the ambulotory setting

Verifying security protocols by knowledge analysis

This paper describes a new interactive method to analyse knowledge of participants involved in security protocols and further to verify the correctness of the protocols. The method can detect attacks and flaws involving interleaving sessions besides normal attacks. The implementation of the method in a generic theorem proving environment, namely Isabelle, makes the verification of protocols mechanical and efficient; it can verify a medium-sized security protocol in less than ten seconds. As an example, the paper finds the flaw in the Needham-Schroeder public key authentication protocol and proves the secure properties and guarantees of the protocol with Lowe's fix to show the effectiveness of this method

SPEAKING ASSESSMENT: IMPACT OF TRAINING SESSIONS

The article focuses on the problem of examiner’s objectivity in rating Speaking proficiency in a foreign language at standardized high-stakes tests. Since there are different factors which may impact the assessment reliability, special training sessions are widely usedby different testing centers. They are expected to eliminate examiners’ subjectivity and lead to interrater agreement and intrarater consistency. The research described in the article was aimed at finding empirical evidence of the efficiency of such sessions. The outcomes of the study proved the sessions to be efficient in terms of rating accuracy of the examiners.The article focuses on the problem of examiner’s objectivity in rating Speaking proficiency in a foreign language at standardized high-stakes tests. Since there are different factors which may impact the assessment reliability, special training sessions are widely usedby different testing centers. They are expected to eliminate examiners’ subjectivity and lead to interrater agreement and intrarater consistency. The research described in the article was aimed at finding empirical evidence of the efficiency of such sessions. The outcomes of the study proved the sessions to be efficient in terms of rating accuracy of the examiners

Insularity : representations and constructions of small worlds, 2013 : conference review

In November 2013, the Department of German at the University of Malta held its first international interdisciplinary conference, titled ‘Insularity: Representations and Constructions of Small Worlds’. The three-day conference took place at Europe House and the Old University Building, both in Valletta, Malta. Except for the second day, which featured several parallel sessions, the conference panels were grouped on an alternating thematic basis making the panel system as dynamic as possible. Despite the relatively tight schedule, the conference moved along smoothly and showed all the signs of an extremely well-organised, efficient and professional event. This review will attend to some of the main recurring strands of thought that featured throughout the conference accordingly.peer-reviewe