Differences in intention to use educational RSS feeds between Lebanese and British students: A multi‑group analysis based on the technology acceptance model

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) offers a means for university students to receive timely updates from virtual learning environments. However, despite its utility, only 21% of home students surveyed at a university in Lebanon claim to have ever used the technology. To investigate whether national culture could be an influence on intention to use RSS, the survey was extended to British students in the UK. Using the Technology Adoption Model (TAM) as a research framework, 437 students responded to a questionnaire containing four constructs: behavioral intention to use; attitude towards benefit; perceived usefulness; and perceived ease of use. Principle components analysis and structural equation modelling were used to explore the psychometric qualities and utility of TAM in both contexts. The results show that adoption was significantly higher, but also modest, in the British context at 36%. Configural and metric invariance were fully supported, while scalar and factorial invariance were partially supported. Further analysis shows significant differences between perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use across the two contexts studied. Therefore, it is recommended that faculty demonstrate to students how educational RSS feeds can be used effectively to increase awareness and emphasize usefulness in both contexts

Certified Impossibility Results for Byzantine-Tolerant Mobile Robots

We propose a framework to build formal developments for robot networks using the COQ proof assistant, to state and to prove formally various properties. We focus in this paper on impossibility proofs, as it is natural to take advantage of the COQ higher order calculus to reason about algorithms as abstract objects. We present in particular formal proofs of two impossibility results forconvergence of oblivious mobile robots if respectively more than one half and more than one third of the robots exhibit Byzantine failures, starting from the original theorems by Bouzid et al.. Thanks to our formalization, the corresponding COQ developments are quite compact. To our knowledge, these are the first certified (in the sense of formally proved) impossibility results for robot networks

A Survey on Continuous Time Computations

We provide an overview of theories of continuous time computation. These theories allow us to understand both the hardness of questions related to continuous time dynamical systems and the computational power of continuous time analog models. We survey the existing models, summarizing results, and point to relevant references in the literature

Route Planning in Transportation Networks

We survey recent advances in algorithms for route planning in transportation networks. For road networks, we show that one can compute driving directions in milliseconds or less even at continental scale. A variety of techniques provide different trade-offs between preprocessing effort, space requirements, and query time. Some algorithms can answer queries in a fraction of a microsecond, while others can deal efficiently with real-time traffic. Journey planning on public transportation systems, although conceptually similar, is a significantly harder problem due to its inherent time-dependent and multicriteria nature. Although exact algorithms are fast enough for interactive queries on metropolitan transit systems, dealing with continent-sized instances requires simplifications or heavy preprocessing. The multimodal route planning problem, which seeks journeys combining schedule-based transportation (buses, trains) with unrestricted modes (walking, driving), is even harder, relying on approximate solutions even for metropolitan inputs.Comment: This is an updated version of the technical report MSR-TR-2014-4, previously published by Microsoft Research. This work was mostly done while the authors Daniel Delling, Andrew Goldberg, and Renato F. Werneck were at Microsoft Research Silicon Valle

Legal Information and the Development of American Law: Writings on the Form and Structure of the Published Law

Robert C. Berring\u27s writings about the impacts of electronic databases, the Internet, and other communications technologies on legal research and practice are an essential part of a larger literature that explores the ways in which the forms and structures of published legal information have influenced how American lawyers think about the law. This paper reviews Berring\u27s writings, along with those of other writers concerned with these questions, focusing on the implications of Berring\u27s idea that in the late nineteenth century American legal publishers created a conceptual universe of thinkable thoughts through which U.S. lawyers came to view the law. It concludes that, spurred by Berring and others, the literature of legal information has become far reaching in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, while the themes struck in Berring\u27s work continue to inform the scholarship of newer writers

Weighted Modal Transition Systems

Specification theories as a tool in model-driven development processes of component-based software systems have recently attracted a considerable attention. Current specification theories are however qualitative in nature, and therefore fragile in the sense that the inevitable approximation of systems by models, combined with the fundamental unpredictability of hardware platforms, makes it difficult to transfer conclusions about the behavior, based on models, to the actual system. Hence this approach is arguably unsuited for modern software systems. We propose here the first specification theory which allows to capture quantitative aspects during the refinement and implementation process, thus leveraging the problems of the qualitative setting. Our proposed quantitative specification framework uses weighted modal transition systems as a formal model of specifications. These are labeled transition systems with the additional feature that they can model optional behavior which may or may not be implemented by the system. Satisfaction and refinement is lifted from the well-known qualitative to our quantitative setting, by introducing a notion of distances between weighted modal transition systems. We show that quantitative versions of parallel composition as well as quotient (the dual to parallel composition) inherit the properties from the Boolean setting.Comment: Submitted to Formal Methods in System Desig