The Crossing Numbers of Cartesian Products of Stars with 5-Vertex Graphs

In this paper, the crossing number of Cartesian products of a speci c 5-vertex graph with a star are given, and this lls up the crossing number list of Cartesian products of all 5-vertex graphs with stars (presented by Marian Klesc)

Developing an ePortfolio as a Capstone Experience for Graduate Studies in Information Science: A Process-to-Product Model and its Implementation

As the world is rapidly changing into a knowledge and information society, it is important for higher education to prepare graduates for successful careers and life in facing the 21st century challenges. Lifelong learning is one of the much-needed skills. Since the turn of the century, pioneers have sought theories, pedagogies, and best practices to innovate education. ePortfolio has been proposed as a learner-centered approach to teaching, learning and assessment. Adopting ePortfolio is more than just an innovation in teaching, educators are transforming education from a positivistic paradigm built on behavior theory to a post-modern paradigm or multi-paradigmatic approach. What is ePortfolio? The notion is open for interpretation in various contexts from a collection of works to showcase a learner\u27s outcome according to standards to a capstone product that integrates learning outcomes across the curriculum and demonstrates professional promise. This paper presents a conceptual model and its implementations of a graduate-level capstone ePortfolio program as a degree requirement. The model conceptualizes ePortfolio as a process leading to product (eP-pro): 1. During the process, the learner: • works closely with an advisor to plan a personalized curriculum with the focus on learning outcomes to support the student’s career goal • self-assesses progress by accomplishing milestones • collects learning artifacts and reflects on them 2. As a final product, the learner • presents selected artifacts to showcase how the learner applied knowledge and what skills the learner mastered • reflects on learning experiences and achievement to project beyond graduation • delivers the ePortfolio on the Web To engage learners and foster self-regulated learning, the process is monitored by four milestones (A figure will be included in the paper): 1. learning goals and action plans 2. ePortfolio prototype (site architecture and navigation plus one artifact) 3. ePortfolio 4. ePortfolio defense To ensure high quality presentational ePortfolios across all learners, the presentational ePortfolio includes five sections: reflection, knowledge, artifacts, competences and projection. The sections are interrelated. For example, in reflection the learner highlights achievements in connection with learning goals and in projection the learner looks forward to the future in the chosen career path. The three sections knowledge, artifacts and competences are related in that the learner articulates selected concepts (or theories) and how they were applied to produce the artifacts, and how these artifacts demonstrate the skills (competences); further, learners make references (hyperlinks) between specific concepts and their artifacts, and between specific artifacts and their competences. Matrices are used to map learning goals with actions and to integrate and show the relationships among the knowledge, artifacts, and competences (K-A-C). The K-A-C matrix, which is displayed graphically as a table, visually demonstrates how artifacts are built upon specific knowledge concepts as well as the skills needed to produce artifacts. Ongoing action research is conducted every semester after all ePortfolios have been defended to understand the experiences of ePortfolio students and advisors and to solicit input and suggestions. The findings have been incorporated in order to improve the process and revise the guidelines

Comparing cognitive maps using graph algorithms.

The purpose of this project is two-fold: (1) to examine researchers' knowledge structures on research topics; (2) to compare knowledge structures of experts with those of non-experts. Expert is defined as the researcher who had conducted in-depth research and published on the topic and whose vocabulary used to describe the topic for online searching was the basis for constructing maps. Non-experts are also researchers in the same field but had not done any in-depth work on the topics when they were asked to make a map using the given vocabulary. Both experts and non-experts were allowed to add new terms to or drop original terms from the given vocabulary. The finished cognitive map is a structured layout of the terms on a two-dimensional plane. During the mapping process, subjects also provided thinking-aloud protocols, which revealed additional information on how they saw the relationships of the concepts represented by the terms. Preliminary analyses of ten sets of cognitive maps for ten research topics revealed differences in final vocabulary (after adding and dropping terms), configuration (topdown, left-right, radial, etc.), and foci (focusing on problems, issues or processes). These results were reported at the 1999 ASIS Annual Meeting. Work has just been completed to advance the comparison of semantic closeness using graph theory to convert maps into matrices and to calculate similarities. The following algorithms have been developed for the conversion and calculation of cognitive maps

Open peer review: an innovation in scientific publishing

This research observes the emerging open peer review journals. In scientific publishing, transparency in peer review is a growing topic of interest for online journals. The traditional blind refereeing process has been criticized for lacking transparency. Although the idea of open peer review (OPR) has been explored since 1980s, it is only in this decade that OPR journals are born. Towards a more open publishing model, the peer review process--once accessible only to the editors and referees—is now available to public. The published article and its review history are being integrated into one entity; readers can submit or post comments to extend the peer process. This preliminary study observed four pioneer OPR journals representing pre-publication OPR and post-publication OPR. Data collection focuses on publication’s lifecycle from its submission to peer approval. Preliminary results include comparisons of the level of openness and nature of interactions during refereeing process

Crystal structure of diaqua-(N-(1-(pyrazin-2-yl)ethylidene)pyridin-1-ium-4-carbohydrazonate-κ3N,N′,O)-tris[nitrato-κ2O,O′)lanthanum(III), C12H15N8O12La

Abstract C12H15N8O12La, monoclinic, P21/c (no. 14), a = 8.3267(7) Å, b = 28.348(2) Å, c = 9.1097(8) Å, β = 107.5410(10)°, V = 2050.3(3) Å3, Z = 4, R gt(F) = 0.0236, wR ref(F 2) = 0.0559, T = 296(2) K

Are the markets for factories and offices integrated? Evidence from Hong Kong?

Due to the relocation of manufacturing facilities from Hong Kong to Mainland China, it is widely believed that some vacant private factories have been used as offices in Hong Kong. Yet there is no direct and systematic evidence to support this speculation. In fact, according to MacGregor and Schwann (2003), industrial and commercial real estate shares some common features. Our research attempts to investigate empirically the price and volume relationship between industrial and commercial real estate, using both aggregate and disaggregate data from the industrial and commercial property markets in Hong Kong. The study was built on the observation that economic restructuring and geographical distance will affect the substitutability (and thus the correlation) of different types of property, and utilizes commonly used time series techniques for analysis. Policy implications are discussed.aggregation bias, geographical distance, industrial real estate, substitutability

ID-XCB: Data-independent Debiasing for Fair and Accurate Transformer-based Cyberbullying Detection

Swear words are a common proxy to collect datasets with cyberbullying incidents. Our focus is on measuring and mitigating biases derived from spurious associations between swear words and incidents occurring as a result of such data collection strategies. After demonstrating and quantifying these biases, we introduce ID-XCB, the first data-independent debiasing technique that combines adversarial training, bias constraints and debias fine-tuning approach aimed at alleviating model attention to bias-inducing words without impacting overall model performance. We explore ID-XCB on two popular session-based cyberbullying datasets along with comprehensive ablation and generalisation studies. We show that ID-XCB learns robust cyberbullying detection capabilities while mitigating biases, outperforming state-of-the-art debiasing methods in both performance and bias mitigation. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate its generalisability to unseen data

Expert Recommended Biomedical Journal Articles: Their Retractions or Corrections, and Post-retraction Citing

Faculty Opinions has provided recommendations of important biomedical publications by domain experts (FMs) since 2001. The purpose of this study is two-fold: 1) identify the characteristics of the expert-recommended articles that were subsequently retracted; 2) investigate what happened after retraction. We examined a set of 232 recommended, later retracted or corrected articles. These articles were classified as New Finding (43%), Interesting Hypothesis (16%), etc. More than 71% of the articles acknowledged funding support; the NIH (US) was a top funder (64%). The top reasons for retractions were Errors of various types (28%); Falsification/fabrication of data, image, or results (20%); Unreliable data, image, or results (16%); and Results not reproducible (16%). Retractions took from less than two months to almost 14 years. Only 15 % of recommendations were withdrawn either after dissents were made by other FMs or after retractions. Most of the retracted articles continue to be cited post-retraction, especially those published in Nature, Science, and Cell. Significant positive correlations were observed between post-retraction citations and pre-retraction citations, between post-retraction citations and peak citations, and between post-retraction citations and the post-retraction citing span. A significant negative correlation was also observed between the post-retraction citing span and years taken to reach peak citations. Literature recommendation systems need to update the changing status of the recommended articles in a timely manner; invite the recommending experts to update their recommendations; and provide a personalized mechanism to alert users who have accessed the recommended articles on their subsequent retractions, concerns, or corrections

End-user Searching of Web Resources: Subject Needs and Zero-hits

This study analyzed a log file capturing users' queries executed in the Web site of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville during March, 1997. The purpose of the study is three-fold: to understand what information needs the users of this Web site have, to investigate how successful these end-users are in searching for information, and to identify problems related to unsuccessful queries. Content analysis of each query focused on the type of information needs and the type of errors that caused a zero-hit result. Fifteen classes of information needs are identified based on content analysis of the queries; the most frequently occurred queries are searching for institutional unit and searching for academic information (counting for 40.0% ofthe total queries searched). The unsuccessful queries is more than 33.5% measured by zero-hit outcomes. Two types of errors that caused zero-hit are identified: syntactic and semantic errors. Syntactic errors occurred more often than semantic errors (53.6% vs. 46.4%). The fmdings suggest that end-users of Web resources need guidance and help in performing searches. Syntactic errors may be corrected by the search engine automatically, while semantic errors need a better information representation scheme from the Web site