Exploring resilience for effective learning in computer science education

Background and context: Many factors have been shown to be important for supporting effective learning and teaching – and thus progression and success – in formal educational contexts. While factors such as key introductory-level computer science knowledge and skills, as well as pre-university learning and qualifications, have been extensively explored, the impact of measures of positive psychology are less well understood for the discipline of computer science. This preliminary work investigates the relationships between effective learning and success, and two measures of positive psychology, Grit (Duckworth’s 12-item Grit scale) [6] and the Nicolson McBride Resilience Quotient (NMRQ) [3], in success in first-year undergraduate computer science to provide insight into the factors that impact on the transition from secondary education into tertiary education

A conceptual framework for classifying and understanding relationship marketing in schools.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework that provides insight and aids understanding of the complex array of relationships schools have with individuals, organisations and other entities. Design/methodology/approach – The conceptual framework is drawn from the Relationship Marketing literature and applied to a school context in the UK. In doing so, it provides a simplified representation of the environment in which schools operate and a valuable classification structure for the many different relationships a school has. This framework will be of benefit to both academics and practitioners. Findings – The authors find that the relationships schools have can be classified within the conceptual framework. The framework aids understanding of the different relationships and provides insights into how these relationships can be developed and where value can be added. Application of the framework also highlights the complex nature of the relationships schools can have with others and the need to manage those relationships well. Research implications – The framework developed in this paper is conceptual and needs to be tested empirically. Originality/value – This paper responds to the call from Oplatka et al. (2004) to provide further research into the area of Relationship Marketing in the context of schools. It adds value by drawing together various aspects of Relationship Marketing, providing an analysis of their relevance to educational services marketing and identifying and applying a conceptual framework which classifies the relationships schools have with others. This paper provides important insights for those within schools who are responsible for the management of relationships with their organization and for others seeking to foster greater engagement with schools

Symbiot: Congestion-Driven Multi-resource Fairness for Multi-user Sensor Networks

© 2015 IEEE.In this paper, we study the problem of multi-resource fairness in multi-user sensor networks with heterogeneous and time-varying resources. Particularly we focus on data gathering applications run on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) or Internet of Things (IoT) in which users require to run a serious of sensing operations with various resource requirements. We consider both the resource demands of sensing tasks, and data forwarding tasks needed to establish multi-hop relay communications. By exploiting graph theory, queueing theory and the notion of dominant resource shares, we develop Symbiot, a light-weight, distributed algorithm that ensures multi-resource fairness between these users. With Symbiot, nodes can independently schedule its resources while maintaining network-level resource fairness through observing traffic congestion levels. Large-scale simulations based Contiki OS and Cooja network emulator show the effectiveness of Symbiot in adaptively utilizing available resources and reducing average completion times

A Systematic Key Management Mechanism for Practical Body Sensor Networks

Security plays a vital role in promoting the practicality of Wireless Body Sensor Networks (BSNs), which provides a promising solution to precise human physiological status monitoring. A fundamental security issue in BSN is key management, including establishment and maintenance of the key system. However, current BSN key management solutions are either designed for specific phases of a BSN’s life-time or restricted to strong assumptions such as homogeneous BSN composition, pre-deployed key materials, and existing secure path, which limits their applications in real-world BSNs. In this paper, we develop the Systematic Key Management (SKM) for practical BSNs, where basic human interactions are conducted for non-predeployed secure BSN initialization, and authenticated key agreement is achieved using lightweight non-pairing certificateless public key cryptography. We construct a BSN prototype consisting of selfdesigned motes and Android phones to evaluate the real-world performance of SKM. Through extensive simulations and test-bed experiments, we demonstrate that our lightweight SKM scheme manages to provide high security guarantee while outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both computation and storage efficiency

Practical opportunistic data collection in wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks (WSN-MSs) are considered a viable alternative to the heavy cost of deployment of traditional wireless sensing infrastructures at scale. However, current state-of-the-art approaches perform poorly in practice due to their requirement of mobility prediction and specific assumptions on network topology. In this paper, we focus on lowdelay and high-throughput opportunistic data collection in WSN-MSs with general network topologies and arbitrary numbers of mobile sinks. We first propose a novel routing metric, Contact-Aware ETX (CA-ETX), to estimate the packet transmission delay caused by both packet retransmissions and intermittent connectivity. By implementing CA-ETX in the defacto TinyOS routing standard CTP and the IETF IPv6 routing protocol RPL, we demonstrate that CA-ETX can work seamlessly with ETX. This means that current ETXbased routing protocols for static WSNs can be easily extended to WSN-MSs with minimal modification by using CA-ETX. Further, by combing CA-ETX with the dynamic backpressure routing, we present a throughput-optimal scheme Opportunistic Backpressure Collection (OBC). Both CA-ETX and OBC are lightweight, easy to implement, and require no mobility prediction. Through test-bed experiments and extensive simulations, we show that the proposed schemes significantly outperform current approaches in terms of packet transmission delay, communication overhead, storage overheads, reliability, and scalability

The Evolutionary Trajectory of the Icelandic New Passive

We examine the diachronics of a New Passive construction in Icelandic and use Yang\u27s model of language learning and change to explain its rapid rise. The New Passive has been spreading at the expense of a Canonical Passive in the recent past 50 years. Applying empirical measurements from the IcePaHC corpus, we show that our model can be used to account for the spread of the New Passive and the rate of change. The model also has implications for the actuation of the change

CMOS imager for pointing and tracking applications

Systems and techniques to realize pointing and tracking applications with CMOS imaging devices. In general, in one implementation, the technique includes: sampling multiple rows and multiple columns of an active pixel sensor array into a memory array (e.g., an on-chip memory array), and reading out the multiple rows and multiple columns sampled in the memory array to provide image data with reduced motion artifact. Various operation modes may be provided, including TDS, CDS, CQS, a tracking mode to read out multiple windows, and/or a mode employing a sample-first-read-later readout scheme. The tracking mode can take advantage of a diagonal switch array. The diagonal switch array, the active pixel sensor array and the memory array can be integrated onto a single imager chip with a controller. This imager device can be part of a larger imaging system for both space-based applications and terrestrial applications