Common Cents Public Participation Findings

Presents findings from focus groups and online surveys, examines citizens' values and long-term priorities in addressing state budget challenges, including reforms in services and the tax structure and a competent, innovative government to implement them

An Approach for Management of Regional Portal Sites through Project-Based Learning

In this paper, we present an approach for management of regional portal sites through project-based learning. In this approach, we have developed a framework to regularly provide information systems and contents based on needs of regional communities for the regional portal site by developing them on the project-based learning in our university. The waterfall model that is one of the software development techniques as the method of executing the project-based learning is practiced. This paper shows current status and effectiveness of our approach

Educational Assessment in Emerging Areas of Design: Toward the Development of a Systematic Framework Based on a Study of Rubrics

This paper presents a formative study that investigates the perceived effectiveness of rubrics as assessment tools by communication and industrial design educators and first year design students in the context of a design studio. The project is motivated by the increasing challenge of assessing subjective and intangible attributes that are associated with the teaching of emerging areas in design, and society’s growing need for measurable results. The goal of this project is to shed light on the perceived successes and failures of a specific assessment tool, known as a rubric, and use this information to improve students’ and educators’ understanding, value, and use of assessment tools. Based on the characteristics of the emerging design landscape, this paper argues the importance of assessments and the need for their improvement. It explains the construction of three assessment forms that are based on successful models used in other disciplines. This paper describes how the forms were used throughout the semester to provide an overview of course objectives and assess individual projects. It explains the contents of a questionnaire and describes how it was used at the end of the semester to evaluate students’ perceptions of the assessments forms. Feedback gained from the instructors indicated that rubrics were not more efficient than other forms of assessment but did aid the assessment of intangibles and did not reduce students’ creativity. The results of the questionnaire showed that students perceived the attributes of rubrics more positively than other forms of assessment but still favoured handwritten comments. These findings informed the proposal of a set of considerations that should be taken into account when creating assessment forms for use in classrooms that focus on emerging areas of design. They describe the importance of personal comments, clear terminology, a planned introduction of the tool, and an open-mind. Keywords: Rubrics; Assessment; Evaluation; Pedagogy; Education; Learning; Feedback.</p

These Testing Obsessions Are Getting a Little Weird

This morning, as she was getting ready for work, my wife noticed something unusual about our son, who is in third grade. He was quietly eating breakfast, like he always does, but something about him was different. He was wearing a plain white t-shirt. He must have noticed that she was looking at him, because he looked up and said: Do you think it\u27s okay if I wear this shirt today? His wardrobe normally consists of about five t-shirts that he cycles through, one after the other, and sometimes tries to wear twice in a row if we don\u27t catch him.[excerpt

Of the use of the “English sector” in trigonometry: what amount of mathematical training was necessary in the 18th century?

In 1723 Edmund Stone published The construction and principal uses of mathematical instruments, which was essentially a translation from the French of Bion’s Traité de la construction et des principaux usages des instrumens de mathématique (1709). As the title of the book indicated, Stone annexed a number of instruments that had been omitted by Bion, in particular, those invented or improved by the English. Hence, after the translation of Book II, on the construction and uses of the “French sector”, Stone added a chapter on the “English sector”. In the 17th century there had been a number of debates concerning the amount of mathematical training required for the study of mathematical instruments. In the context of the study of mathematical instruments in the 18th century, it is worth exploring the link theory-practice in the books on instruments. The aim of this contribution is to explore the mathematical knowledge involved in the use and applications of the “English sector” in trigonometry in a number of 18th-century books on mathematical instruments.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A Novel String Distance Function based on Most Frequent K Characters

This study aims to publish a novel similarity metric to increase the speed of comparison operations. Also the new metric is suitable for distance-based operations among strings. Most of the simple calculation methods, such as string length are fast to calculate but does not represent the string correctly. On the other hand the methods like keeping the histogram over all characters in the string are slower but good to represent the string characteristics in some areas, like natural language. We propose a new metric, easy to calculate and satisfactory for string comparison. Method is built on a hash function, which gets a string at any size and outputs the most frequent K characters with their frequencies. The outputs are open for comparison and our studies showed that the success rate is quite satisfactory for the text mining operations