Is it the Sweet Siren Of Technology or Just An Ill Wind?

It is the author\u27s opinion that while technology can dominate our vision of the future, creativity and accountability will have a greater effect than any new technology

Hey, Siri, What Is the Future of Extension?

Extension faces unprecedented competition in the information marketplace. Although this is not a new concern, today Extension\u27s competitors are no longer an abstract potential. They reside in our homes across the country. Is the past truly prologue? Is Extension destined to continue to experience erosion of audiences and political support? Or are there opportunities for Extension professionals to step up and stem the flow? The answer to the last question is yes, but doing so will take an understanding of the new competitors in the information marketplace and investments in innovation that do more than just sustain Extension\u27s current market position

Communicators As Architects of Change

Our future as communicators is inextricably tied to the future of Extension and Land-Grant outreach

A Central American Success Story: Innovation in International Distance Education

Based on actual workshop experiences, faculty at the Honduran Zamorano University in Central America created an effective, size-neutral, world-class distance education (e-learning) program for serving learners throughout Latin America through online and distance learning technology. The program is known as PAC @ D (Programa de Aprendizaje Continuo a Distancia or Life Long Learning Program at a Distance). It is administered by Zamorano’s global center for distance learning. The establishment of PAC @ D in 2010 was preceded by workshop efforts begun in 2004 by the authors. The workshop efforts focused on bridging the cultural uniqueness of educational programs in Latin America and the United States. The goal was to assist local faculty and staff at Zamorano University to build their own digital platform effectively and extend academic and outreach programs through that digital platform. The use of online and distance learning technologies can help extend intellectual capital beyond the limits of the physical campus in fulfilling the teaching, outreach/extension, and, to a limited extent, research missions. However, as we shall see in this professional paper, distance learning is more than turning on the technology with a click and a keystroke. At Zamorano, the development of PAC @ D required many hours of a full range of pedagogical and technological training, spread over 18 months. This professional development paper provides the rationale for PAC @ D, outlines its development, and provides suggestions for enhancing the educational experiences of distance learners

Evaluating interviews which search for the truth with suspects: but are investigators’ self-assessments of their own skills truthful ones?

Self-evaluation of one’s own performance has been found in prior research to be an enabler of professional development. The task of evaluation is also a core component of a model of the investigative interviewing of victims, witnesses and suspects, being increasingly used throughout the world. However, it remains the case that there has been little research as to how practitioners approach the task itself. The present study examined the topic through the lens of observing how effectively 30 real-life investigators in the UK undertook evaluation of their interviews, representing almost the entire investigative frontline workforce of a small law enforcement agency in this country. Using an established scale of measurement, both investigators’ and an expert’s ratings of the same sample of interviews were compared across a range of tasks and behaviours. It was found that in almost all the assessed behaviours, requiring of the investigators to provide a self-rating, their scores tended to significantly outstrip those applied to the sample by the expert. Reasons are explored for the investigators’ overstated assessments. Implications for practice are then discussed.N/

Two-Sided Value-Based Music Artist Recommendation in Streaming Music Services

Most work on music recommendations has focused on the consumer side not the provider side. We develop a two-sided value-based approach to music artist recommendation for a streaming music scenario. It combines the value yielded for the music industry and consumers in an integrated model. For the industry, the approach aims to increase the conversion rate of potential listeners to adopters, which produces new revenue. For consumers, it aims to improve their utility related to recommendations they receive. We use one year of listening records for 15,000+ Last.fm users to train and test the proposed recommendation model on 143 artists. Compared to collaborative filtering, the results show some improvement in recommendation performance by considering both sides’ value in con-junction with other factors, including time, location, external information and listening behavior

Preliminary Findings of Inflight Icing Field Test to Support Icing Remote Sensing Technology Assessment

NASA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have developed an icing remote sensing technology that has demonstrated skill at detecting and classifying icing hazards in a vertical column above an instrumented ground station. This technology has recently been extended to provide volumetric coverage surrounding an airport. Building on the existing vertical pointing system, the new method for providing volumetric coverage will utilize a vertical pointing cloud radar, a multifrequency microwave radiometer with azimuth and elevation pointing, and a NEXRAD radar. The new terminal area icing remote sensing system processes the data streams from these instruments to derive temperature, liquid water content, and cloud droplet size for each examined point in space. These data are then combined to ultimately provide icing hazard classification along defined approach paths into an airport

Verification of microarchitectural refinements in rule-based systems

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5970511&tag=1Microarchitectural refinements are often required to meet performance, area, or timing constraints when designing complex digital systems. While refinements are often straightforward to implement, it is difficult to formally specify the conditions of correctness for those which change cycle-level timing. As a result, in the later stages of design only those changes are considered that do not affect timing and whose verification can be automated using tools for checking FSM equivalence. This excludes an essential class of microarchitectural changes, such as the insertion of a register in a long combinational path to meet timing. A design methodology based on guarded atomic actions, or rules, offers an opportunity to raise the notion of correctness to a more abstract level. In rule-based systems, many useful refinements can be expressed simply by breaking a single rule into smaller rules which execute the original operation in multiple steps. Since the smaller rule executions can be interleaved with other rules, the verification task is to determine that no new behaviors have been introduced. We formalize this notion of correctness and present a tool based on SMT solvers that can automatically prove that a refinement is correct, or provide concrete information as to why it is not correct. With this tool, a larger class of refinements at all stages of the design process can be verified easily. We demonstrate the use of our tool in proving the correctness of the refinement of a processor pipeline from four stages to five.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF (#CCF-0541164)