Data Modeling Using Entity Relationship Diagrams: A Step-Wise Method

The concept of designing a relational database can be a difficult one for beginning students to assimilate. Evidence of poor database design in the past ten to fifteen years seems to suggest that educators might need to take a closer look at the way these concepts are presented in the hopes that student understanding might improve and hence, database design might also improve. A method for teaching these concepts that emphasizes a back to basics approach is presented to directly address this problem. The method makes use of a simple framework for helping students learn database design that can be used to supplement any popular text book. The framework is broad so that general information about the design can be obtained, but expandable so that increasing amounts of detail can be added as the design progresses from the conceptual stage through the logical stage, without losing sight of the final goal. The method by which the steps of this process are accomplished within the framework is explained in detail and it is shown how to develop an entity-relationship diagram (ERD) from the information obtained from the users. Although the E-R model is considered dated by many educators, the proper way to apply the method is provided and arguments in favor of its continued use are presented. Examples are included to illustrate the salient points including some which point out common errors and how to address them

Technology in the Classroom: Using Video Links to Enable Long Distance Experiential Learning

The experiential learning process is a method by which students learn from direct exposure to relevant applications within the discipline being taught. One way in which MIS students can benefit from experiential learning occurs when organizations in some way sponsor curricular outcomes. Sponsorship can range from classroom visits during which company representatives can provide students with perspectives on the duties and responsibilities of currently available jobs at their firm to complete participation in a particular course, which could include the assignment of a project, assistance in presenting the concepts to be studied and providing feedback on the results. For organizations located at some distance from the university, participation is generally minimal and may occur only once per year during recruiting visits. In this age of technological advancement, there is a wealth of opportunity for practitioners to play a much larger role in education and bring their experience and techniques directly to the classroom, regardless of their geographical separation from the students. Inexpensive video links can create a virtual classroom that encourages participation by organizations to take advantage of these opportunities; however, the technology is only a means to an end, which is to enhance technical education within an experiential learning framework. This paper discusses the issues that may arise in implementing a virtual classroom and the application of experiential learning in a virtual classroom that can benefit students

Investigating Computer Self-Efficacy with Students in COBOL Programming

The theory of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1982) has been used in the field of Information Systems to test its predictive nature of computing outcomes (Compeau & Higgins, 1995, Gist, Schwoerer & Rosen, 1989; Murphy, Coover & Owen, 1989). It has been shown to be a successful measure of performance and indeed, is now perceived as a “practical indicator of student computer competency” (Karsten & Roth, 1998). This study attempts to further quantify and qualify such a measure and investigates the degree to which self-efficacy can be manipulated. Additionally, it has been traditionally thought that programming maintenance is more difficult when a programmer must modify someone else’s program rather than his or her own. This study also investigates this phenomenon within the context of self-efficacy. Findings show that self-efficacy is an important indicator of outcome performance and that it can be artificially manipulated. Some surprising results occurred when students were asked to modify someone else’s code

Data Modeling Education: The Changing Technology

Data modeling is a difficult topic for students to learn. Worse yet is the fact that practitioners, who look to academia for methods and techniques to perform such model building have found little on which to standardize, although many techniques exist. Entity relationship (ER) modeling was developed in order to help database developers visualize their (relational) database design with its data stores and internal relationships. This technique was certainly an important step forward, yet data collected over the past 11 years would indicate database developers are still having difficulty learning, assimilating, and using design techniques (cf. Blaha, 2004). Confounding the issue is the arrival of the object-oriented paradigm. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was introduced in order to speed, simplify, and clarify design of systems. Portions of the UML are derived from ER modeling and are useful in merging the front end portion of the system with the back end data storage so a picture of the entire system can be viewed by the designer. While providing functionality that ER modeling lacks, the UML approach to data modeling also leaves some developers indecisive and confused as to which technique to use in practice. The same indecision appears to haunt the academic world. So how should data modeling be taught? In order to shed light on this question, we asked contributors to focus on whether this new system of modeling (the UML) yields a better understanding of the database design to the extent that better database designs result. We detected a buzz in the literature and in the IT world that a dichotomy of opinion over this question exists, and so this special issue was born. Educators need to air their opinions, facts, and results and discuss this controversial topic to encourage refinement in this important area. We hope that research ideas can be generated and practitioners informed that this topic is being addressed in academia. As expected, the contributors to this issue provided a dichotomy of opinion but surprisingly, their experiences and opinions moved the issue in a direction far different than what we could have predicted. We now provide you with insight into this poignant topic by presenting this special issue

Methods Included:Standardizing Computational Reuse and Portability with the Common Workflow Language

A widely used standard for portable multilingual data analysis pipelines would enable considerable benefits to scholarly publication reuse, research/industry collaboration, regulatory cost control, and to the environment. Published research that used multiple computer languages for their analysis pipelines would include a complete and reusable description of that analysis that is runnable on a diverse set of computing environments. Researchers would be able to easier collaborate and reuse these pipelines, adding or exchanging components regardless of programming language used; collaborations with and within the industry would be easier; approval of new medical interventions that rely on such pipelines would be faster. Time will be saved and environmental impact would also be reduced, as these descriptions contain enough information for advanced optimization without user intervention. Workflows are widely used in data analysis pipelines, enabling innovation and decision-making for the modern society. In many domains the analysis components are numerous and written in multiple different computer languages by third parties. However, lacking a standard for reusable and portable multilingual workflows, then reusing published multilingual workflows, collaborating on open problems, and optimizing their execution would be severely hampered. Moreover, only a standard for multilingual data analysis pipelines that was widely used would enable considerable benefits to research-industry collaboration, regulatory cost control, and to preserving the environment. Prior to the start of the CWL project, there was no standard for describing multilingual analysis pipelines in a portable and reusable manner. Even today / currently, although there exist hundreds of single-vendor and other single-source systems that run workflows, none is a general, community-driven, and consensus-built standard

Community-driven development for computational biology at Sprints, Hackathons and Codefests

Background: Computational biology comprises a wide range of technologies and approaches. Multiple technologies can be combined to create more powerful workflows if the individuals contributing the data or providing tools for its interpretation can find mutual understanding and consensus. Much conversation and joint investigation are required in order to identify and implement the best approaches. Traditionally, scientific conferences feature talks presenting novel technologies or insights, followed up by informal discussions during coffee breaks. In multi-institution collaborations, in order to reach agreement on implementation details or to transfer deeper insights in a technology and practical skills, a representative of one group typically visits the other. However, this does not scale well when the number of technologies or research groups is large. Conferences have responded to this issue by introducing Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions, which offer an opportunity for individuals with common interests to intensify their interaction. However, parallel BoF sessions often make it hard for participants to join multiple BoFs and find common ground between the different technologies, and BoFs are generally too short to allow time for participants to program together. Results: This report summarises our experience with computational biology Codefests, Hackathons and Sprints, which are interactive developer meetings. They are structured to reduce the limitations of traditional scientific meetings described above by strengthening the interaction among peers and letting the participants determine the schedule and topics. These meetings are commonly run as loosely scheduled "unconferences" (self-organized identification of participants and topics for meetings) over at least two days, with early introductory talks to welcome and organize contributors, followed by intensive collaborative coding sessions. We summarise some prominent achievements of those meetings and describe differences in how these are organised, how their audience is addressed, and their outreach to their respective communities. Conclusions: Hackathons, Codefests and Sprints share a stimulating atmosphere that encourages participants to jointly brainstorm and tackle problems of shared interest in a self-driven proactive environment, as well as providing an opportunity for new participants to get involved in collaborative projects

LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models

The advent of large language models (LLMs) and their adoption by the legal community has given rise to the question: what types of legal reasoning can LLMs perform? To enable greater study of this question, we present LegalBench: a collaboratively constructed legal reasoning benchmark consisting of 162 tasks covering six different types of legal reasoning. LegalBench was built through an interdisciplinary process, in which we collected tasks designed and hand-crafted by legal professionals. Because these subject matter experts took a leading role in construction, tasks either measure legal reasoning capabilities that are practically useful, or measure reasoning skills that lawyers find interesting. To enable cross-disciplinary conversations about LLMs in the law, we additionally show how popular legal frameworks for describing legal reasoning—which distinguish between its many forms—correspond to LegalBench tasks, thus giving lawyers and LLM developers a common vocabulary. This paper describes LegalBench, presents an empirical evaluation of 20 open-source and commercial LLMs, and illustrates the types of research explorations LegalBench enables

Antimicrobial resistance among migrants in Europe: a systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Rates of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are rising globally and there is concern that increased migration is contributing to the burden of antibiotic resistance in Europe. However, the effect of migration on the burden of AMR in Europe has not yet been comprehensively examined. Therefore, we did a systematic review and meta-analysis to identify and synthesise data for AMR carriage or infection in migrants to Europe to examine differences in patterns of AMR across migrant groups and in different settings. METHODS: For this systematic review and meta-analysis, we searched MEDLINE, Embase, PubMed, and Scopus with no language restrictions from Jan 1, 2000, to Jan 18, 2017, for primary data from observational studies reporting antibacterial resistance in common bacterial pathogens among migrants to 21 European Union-15 and European Economic Area countries. To be eligible for inclusion, studies had to report data on carriage or infection with laboratory-confirmed antibiotic-resistant organisms in migrant populations. We extracted data from eligible studies and assessed quality using piloted, standardised forms. We did not examine drug resistance in tuberculosis and excluded articles solely reporting on this parameter. We also excluded articles in which migrant status was determined by ethnicity, country of birth of participants' parents, or was not defined, and articles in which data were not disaggregated by migrant status. Outcomes were carriage of or infection with antibiotic-resistant organisms. We used random-effects models to calculate the pooled prevalence of each outcome. The study protocol is registered with PROSPERO, number CRD42016043681. FINDINGS: We identified 2274 articles, of which 23 observational studies reporting on antibiotic resistance in 2319 migrants were included. The pooled prevalence of any AMR carriage or AMR infection in migrants was 25·4% (95% CI 19·1-31·8; I2 =98%), including meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (7·8%, 4·8-10·7; I2 =92%) and antibiotic-resistant Gram-negative bacteria (27·2%, 17·6-36·8; I2 =94%). The pooled prevalence of any AMR carriage or infection was higher in refugees and asylum seekers (33·0%, 18·3-47·6; I2 =98%) than in other migrant groups (6·6%, 1·8-11·3; I2 =92%). The pooled prevalence of antibiotic-resistant organisms was slightly higher in high-migrant community settings (33·1%, 11·1-55·1; I2 =96%) than in migrants in hospitals (24·3%, 16·1-32·6; I2 =98%). We did not find evidence of high rates of transmission of AMR from migrant to host populations. INTERPRETATION: Migrants are exposed to conditions favouring the emergence of drug resistance during transit and in host countries in Europe. Increased antibiotic resistance among refugees and asylum seekers and in high-migrant community settings (such as refugee camps and detention facilities) highlights the need for improved living conditions, access to health care, and initiatives to facilitate detection of and appropriate high-quality treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections during transit and in host countries. Protocols for the prevention and control of infection and for antibiotic surveillance need to be integrated in all aspects of health care, which should be accessible for all migrant groups, and should target determinants of AMR before, during, and after migration. FUNDING: UK National Institute for Health Research Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, Imperial College Healthcare Charity, the Wellcome Trust, and UK National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit in Healthcare-associated Infections and Antimictobial Resistance at Imperial College London