Teaching Java to IS Students: Top Ten Most Heinous Programming Errors

Learning to write computer programs is a difficult process. This short experience paper details ten common, yet difficult to spot errors made by students in my introductory Java programming classes. The errors detailed in this article are considered heinous because they either don\u27t occur every time, are hard to spot when desk checking code, are due to an inconsistency in the Java language itself, or all of the above. Along with the errors this article describes teaching techniques to help students avoid them and suggests potential language modifications to preclude them

Leveraging Learning Management System to Accommodate Students with Disabilities: Issues and Experiences with the Canvas LMS

Creating an accessible learning environment in virtual and traditional courses supported by learning management system software (LMS) can be a daunting task. University courses and the policies created to support students with disabilities are subject to a multitude of laws. These include the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, and sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. This paper will briefly detail the relevant laws, and then explain how features of the Canvas LMS can be used to meet satisfy these laws. Experiences and suggestions for improvement are also provided

Technology Supported Education :Virtual WSU Business Administration Pilot Program

This paper discusses a new initiative at Washington State University that will provide the opportunity for place-bound students across the state to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration. This degree will be fully AACSB accredited. The program under way at WSU will differ from traditional distance learning methods in that it will provide both live interaction between instructor and student via two-way audio/video connections as well as self-study course materials. Students will enter the Virtual Business Degree program after completing an AA degree at a local community college and will be able to complete their BA in two years. Electronic technology such as WWW, email, online audio and video lectures, chat rooms, and EMAIL will be the primary mechanisms used to deliver course materials and administer assignments and exams. Starting in January of 1998, courses will be delivered to students at four learning centers in remote areas of the state. The success of the program will be assessed on a course by course basis and as a whole. Multivariate statistical analysis will be used to measure the differences in student achievement and satisfaction as compared to students in the traditional classroom environment. From this we hope to measure not only the viability of the program but the relative success of distance learning techniques employed in the various courses

Computer Automated Reconciliation of Activity Models for Group Supported Organizational Modeling

Research at the University of Arizona and elsewhere have suggested that Electronic Meeting Systems augmented to support construction of Activity models can effectively support groups during development of semantic models. Group-enabled tools developed at the University of Arizona allow large groups of individuals from various functional units of an organization to actively participate in model development and to build models two to three times faster than traditional modeling approaches. Rapid model development shortens project times and makes it more likely that key personnel can participate during model development and analysis. To date, the tool set has been successfully used a number of groups for the collaborative development and analysis of business models using the IDEF0 Activity modeling methodology. This paper describes two software methods used to insure model correctness and shorten the model reconciliation proces

Holistic Information Retrieval Through Textual Data Mining

Information retrieval can be likened to a mining process. Searchers drill through a document space using keywords to extract document subsets. These subsets must be reviewed to extract the topically relevant documents from the irrelevant. Searchers interactively learn from the relevance of the document subsets and re- submit more search arguments to perhaps narrow the search to obtain more relevant documents or broaden the search to improve the likelihood of recalling the highest percentage of relevant documents from the document space. Searchers may be aided in the search by using a document organization scheme used by human categorizers to organize the document space. Such schemes, such as the Library of Congress Classification System, tend to be rigid and dated. Documents are greatly increasing and number and organizational schemes such as the LCCS are not adapting well to the varying content of books and documents being added to the document space. What is needed is an automatic mapping tool that 1) takes the document space as it is, 2) creates a conceptual map of the space, and 3) clusters like documents and places them together on the map. This research (in progress) is an attempt to determine the value of the Kohonen Self-Organizing Map (SOM) (Kohonen, 1995) for use as an interactive textual data mining tool for categorization of large sets of documents. The SOM algorithm analyzed 339 Management Information Systems Quarterly abstracts from 1985 to 1997. The first analysis resulted in a map of two major regions -- Information and Systems. This demonstrated that the SOM was working correctly but produced a potentially uninteresting map. What may be more interesting is the next level of conceptual detail, i.e., the major conceptual areas of the MISQ document space below this high level of abstraction. To obtain this map, management, information, and systems was added to a stop-word list and the Kohonen algorithm was reapplied to obtain a mapping of the MISQ literature at this second level of detail below Management Information Systems. At both levels of abstraction, the 339 abstracts were partitioned among the conceptual regions. This suggests the possibility for an interactive tool that aids searchers in exploring large document spaces by using a divide and conquer approach of information retrieval whereby the tool clusters similar documents into topical regions of the map for exploratory browsing

Team Composition, Knowledge and Collaboration

This paper explores the effects of knowledge homogeneity (shared or common) and knowledge heterogeneity (distributed) on team outcomes and processes. An experiment was conducted in which teams made resource allocation decisions while physically dispersed and supported with a shared virtual work surface and chat. The task required teams to learn and recognize patterns and then collaborate to allocate their resources appropriately. Dependent measures included process (chat, movement, conflict), and outcome quality. All teams received significant financial rewards in direct proportion to their performance. Teams with common knowledge significantly outperformed teams with distributed knowledge. Heterogeneous teams appeared to use the leader/follower paradigm

Early life child micronutrient status, maternal reasoning, and a nurturing household environment have persistent influences on child cognitive development at age 5 years: Results from MAL-ED

Background: Child cognitive development is influenced by early-life insults and protective factors. To what extent these factors have a long-term legacy on child development and hence fulfillment of cognitive potential is unknown. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the relation between early-life factors (birth to 2 y) and cognitive development at 5 y. Methods: Observational follow-up visits were made of children at 5 y, previously enrolled in the community-based MAL-ED longitudinal cohort. The burden of enteropathogens, prevalence of illness, complementary diet intake, micronutrient status, and household and maternal factors from birth to 2 y were extensively measured and their relation with the Wechsler Preschool Primary Scales of Intelligence at 5 y was examined through use of linear regression. Results: Cognitive T-scores from 813 of 1198 (68%) children were examined and 5 variables had significant associations in multivariable models: mean child plasma transferrin receptor concentration (β: −1.81, 95% CI: −2.75, −0.86), number of years of maternal education (β: 0.27, 95% CI: 0.08, 0.45), maternal cognitive reasoning score (β: 0.09, 95% CI: 0.03, 0.15), household assets score (β: 0.64, 95% CI: 0.24, 1.04), and HOME child cleanliness factor (β: 0.60, 95% CI: 0.05, 1.15). In multivariable models, the mean rate of enteropathogen detections, burden of illness, and complementary food intakes between birth and 2 y were not significantly related to 5-y cognition. Conclusions: A nurturing home context in terms of a healthy/clean environment and household wealth, provision of adequate micronutrients, maternal education, and cognitive reasoning have a strong and persistent influence on child cognitive development. Efforts addressing aspects of poverty around micronutrient status, nurturing caregiving, and enabling home environments are likely to have lasting positive impacts on child cognitive development.publishedVersio

SNAPSHOT USA 2019 : a coordinated national camera trap survey of the United States

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.With the accelerating pace of global change, it is imperative that we obtain rapid inventories of the status and distribution of wildlife for ecological inferences and conservation planning. To address this challenge, we launched the SNAPSHOT USA project, a collaborative survey of terrestrial wildlife populations using camera traps across the United States. For our first annual survey, we compiled data across all 50 states during a 14-week period (17 August - 24 November of 2019). We sampled wildlife at 1509 camera trap sites from 110 camera trap arrays covering 12 different ecoregions across four development zones. This effort resulted in 166,036 unique detections of 83 species of mammals and 17 species of birds. All images were processed through the Smithsonian's eMammal camera trap data repository and included an expert review phase to ensure taxonomic accuracy of data, resulting in each picture being reviewed at least twice. The results represent a timely and standardized camera trap survey of the USA. All of the 2019 survey data are made available herein. We are currently repeating surveys in fall 2020, opening up the opportunity to other institutions and cooperators to expand coverage of all the urban-wild gradients and ecophysiographic regions of the country. Future data will be available as the database is updated at eMammal.si.edu/snapshot-usa, as well as future data paper submissions. These data will be useful for local and macroecological research including the examination of community assembly, effects of environmental and anthropogenic landscape variables, effects of fragmentation and extinction debt dynamics, as well as species-specific population dynamics and conservation action plans. There are no copyright restrictions; please cite this paper when using the data for publication.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Early Life Child Micronutrient Status, Maternal Reasoning, and a Nurturing Household Environment have Persistent Influences on Child Cognitive Development at Age 5 years : Results from MAL-ED

Funding Information: The Etiology, Risk Factors and Interactions of Enteric Infections and Malnutrition and the Consequences for Child Health and Development Project (MAL-ED) is carried out as a collaborative project supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foundation for the NIH, and the National Institutes of Health/Fogarty International Center. This work was also supported by the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health (D43-TW009359 to ETR). Author disclosures: BJJM, SAR, LEC, LLP, JCS, BK, RR, RS, ES, LB, ZR, AM, RS, BN, SH, MR, RO, ETR, and LEM-K, no conflicts of interest. Supplemental Tables 1–5 and Supplemental Figures 1–3 are available from the “Supplementary data” link in the online posting of the article and from the same link in the online table of contents at https://academic.oup.com/jn/. Address correspondence to LEM-K (e-mail: [email protected]). Abbreviations used: HOME, Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment inventory; MAL-ED, The Etiology, Risk Factors, and Interactions of Enteric Infections and Malnutrition and the Consequences for Child Health and Development Project; TfR, transferrin receptor; WPPSI, Wechsler Preschool Primary Scales of Intelligence.Peer reviewe