Students Asking Questions: Facilitating Questioning Aids Understanding and Enhances Software Engineering Skills

By providing a means to ask questions anonymously, we provide a non-threatening environment in which we encourage students to fully understand and criticise their assignments. As well as providing practical assistance for those who are struggling with course work, it demonstrates a practical reinforcement of ideas that are commonly taught in courses on software engineering, but it does so in a context that they can directly relate to - their desire to achieve good grades. The approach is based around the use of an HTML form to enable the anonymous submission of questions to staff and the dynamic refinement of assignment specifications. Examples of its use in a course on object-oriented design and C++ are given

Observations and Recommendations on the Internationalisation of Software

As computer programs enter the lives of more and more people worldwide, it is becoming increasingly unacceptable to assume that software with a user interface designed for an indigenous English speaking market will be acceptable outside its country of origin simply by changing the currency symbol. Developers of software who are serious about expanding sales into new markets must consider many issues when giving thought either to the creation of new software or the modification of existing software to work within the linguistic and cultural constraints of these new markets. The purpose of this paper is to examine the task of preparing software to be used in countries and cultures other than that in which it is created. We do this by reviewing some of the most important localisation issues that have been identified, and some of the tools and practices that are available to the software designer to deal with them. We shall also consider some of the areas of the software development process that are currently less well understood and supported. Our major emphasis is in non-graphical applications targeted at European markets. Keywords: Internationalisation, I18N, Localising, Enabling, Multi-lingual

Use of ERTS Data for Mapping Snow Cover in the Western United States

Application of ERTS-1 data to mapping snow cover in mountainous areas of western United State

Lightweight helmet-mounted eye movement measurement system

The helmet-mounted eye movement measuring system, weighs 1,530 grams; the weight of the present aviators' helmet in standard form with the visor is 1,545 grams. The optical head is standard NAC Eye-Mark. This optical head was mounted on a magnesium yoke which in turn was attached to a slide cam mounted on the flight helmet. The slide cam allows one to adjust the eye-to-optics system distance quite easily and to secure it so that the system will remain in calibration. The design of the yoke and slide cam is such that the subject can, in an emergency, move the optical head forward and upward to the stowed and locked position atop the helmet. This feature was necessary for flight safety. The television camera that is used in the system is a solid state General Electric TN-2000 with a charged induced device imager used as the vidicon

CEBAF at Higher Energies

This report summarizes topics in hadron spectroscopy and production which could be addressed at CEBAF with an energy upgrade to $E_\gamma=8$ GeV and beyond. The topics discussed include conventional meson and baryon spectroscopy, spectroscopy of exotica (especially molecules and hybrids), CP and CPT tests using $\phi$ mesons, and new detector and accelerator options.Comment: (A Workshop held at CEBAF, Newport News, Virginia, 14-16 April 1994): 11 pages and 1 figure (available as hard copy from the authors), ORNL/CCIP/94-15.Working Group Report on Hadron Spectroscopy and Productio

A task-based metric for telerobotic performance assessment

A methodology is described for developing a task complexity index based on combining the six basic motion primitives (three translation, three orientation) with force control and accuracy requirements. The result of this development is a set of complexity values that can be assigned to the high-level task primitives derived from a relatively shallow top-down mission analysis. These values are then averaged to arrive at total average mission complexities, such as for the mission of exchanging the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) battery modules. Application of this metric to a candidate set of NASA Flight Telerobotic Servicer evaluation tasks is discussed using the HST battery module mission for an in-depth example

Study to develop improved spacecraft snow survey methods using Skylab/EREP data

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Some services of the Time and Frequency Division of the National Bureau of Standards

The Time and Frequency Division of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) provides several services to the general public. The radio broadcasts of WWV, WWVH, and WWVB supply reliable, unambiguous time signals to many users. The NBS telephone time-of-day service attracts several hundreds of thousands of calls each year. Periodically, the NBS provides courses on specific topics relating to time and frequency technology. In addition to numerous technical papers published each year, the NBS has prepared the first volume of a comprehensive monograph on time and frequency. The results of research in the Time and Frequency Division of the NBS have had significant impact. An active TV time system capable of serving most of the U.S. currently awaits a ruling by the FCC on a petition filed last year on behalf of the NBS by the Department of Commerce. Three more recent developments are: (1) a TV frequency comparator (patent applied for); (2) a method to perform an independent (absolute) frequency evaluation of commercial cesium beam oscillators; and (3) a method of removing one source of frequency drift in commercial cesium beam oscillators