Bot Herding With RSS

Students in a large, introductory IT course created individual RSS feeds that pointed to personal content and syndicated, course-related content.  In a relatively short period the class had amassed approximately 1000 web resources.  The process paralleled one of a benevolent bot herder; the outcome stimulated an interest in social computing

Bot Herding With RSS

Students in a large, introductory IT course created individual RSS feeds that pointed to personal content and syndicated, course-related content.  In a relatively short period the class had amassed approximately 1000 web resources.  The process paralleled one of a benevolent bot herder; the outcome stimulated an interest in social computing.

More With Less Using RSS

Today, many receive information via RSS, an efficient delivery and aggregation technology that feeds user-specific web content to our computers. For an individual, RSS is like having an assistant available to gather the information you want to see from a variety of sources.  For businesses, RSS can be an effective mechanism to reach customers and provide them with the information they have asked for. While there is tremendous growth in the usage of RSS, surprisingly, many of us know little about what it is. 

Closing the Gap: Proficiency vs. Perception

The gaps that exist between a student’s self-perceived computer skills, their actual computer skills, and the computer skills deemed important in business pose an interesting challenge for business schools, today, and for the foreseeable future.  One strategy for managing these literacy gaps is developing curriculum that better tailors content to the evolving literacy of students. In an effort to operationalize this strategy, we have undertaken a study to measure the magnitude of the literacy gaps and the effectiveness of an introductory computer course required in our undergraduate business program. This paper presents the initial results of that study.   

But I Am Computer Literate: I Passed The Test

Generic terms such as “computer literacy,” “computer competency” and “technology literacy” have been used for decades as measures of one’s aptitude with computer and information technology.  Many disregarded the ambiguity of these terms while erratic exposure to ever-changing computer technology rendered itself as computer literacy.   With an increasing focus on organizations now administering technology literacy tests, educators need to be more cognizant of the computer and information literacy assessments and the implications of these assessments for the core information systems course in business schools

The host-range tdCE phenotype of Chandipura virus is determined by mutations in the polymerase gene

The emerging arbovirus Chandipura virus (CV) has been implicated in epidemics of acute encephalitis in India with high mortality rates. The isolation of temperature-dependent host-range (tdCE) mutants, which are impaired in growth at 39 °C in chick embryo (CE) cells but not in monkey cells, highlights a dependence on undetermined host factors. We have characterized three tdCE mutants, each containing one or more coding mutations in the RNA polymerase gene and two containing additional mutations in the attachment protein gene. Using reverse genetics, we showed that a single amino acid change in the virus polymerase of each mutant was responsible for the host-range specificity. In CE cells at the non-permissive temperature, the discrete cytoplasmic replication complexes seen in mammalian cells or at the permissive temperature in CE cells were absent with the tdCE mutants, consistent with the tdCE lesions causing disruption of the replication complexes in a host-dependent manner

Standardizing the information architecture for spacecraft operations

This paper presents an information architecture developed for the Space Station Freedom as a model from which to derive an information architecture standard for advanced spacecraft. The information architecture provides a way of making information available across a program, and among programs, assuming that the information will be in a variety of local formats, structures and representations. It provides a format that can be expanded to define all of the physical and logical elements that make up a program, add definitions as required, and import definitions from prior programs to a new program. It allows a spacecraft and its control center to work in different representations and formats, with the potential for supporting existing spacecraft from new control centers. It supports a common view of data and control of all spacecraft, regardless of their own internal view of their data and control characteristics, and of their communications standards, protocols and formats. This information architecture is central to standardizing spacecraft operations, in that it provides a basis for information transfer and translation, such that diverse spacecraft can be monitored and controlled in a common way

Letter from Langdon C. Easton to George Sibley, February 3, 1847

Transcript of Letter from Langdon C. Easton to brother-in-law, George Sibley, February 3, 1847. Easton discusses the Mexican-American War