Novikov-Shubin invariants for arbitrary group actions and their positivity

We extend the notion of Novikov-Shubin invariant for free G-CW-complexes of finite type to spaces with arbitrary G-actions and prove some statements about their positivity. In particular we apply this to classifying spaces of discrete groups.Comment: 18 pages, metadata change

A Crossroads for Collection Development and Assessment, Its Fallout, and Unknowns: Where Do We Go From Here?

Where do we go from here? Achieving goals of sustainable resource collections through a thorough collection assessment is evermore challenged by fallout and unknowns lurking ubiquitously. There is an ever‐increasing competition for both physical space and economic space. We’re at an important crossroads for collection development, collection assessment, and libraries themselves. Change and assessment must be sustainable. To be effective, change must create its own momentum. Three years into our collection assessment project, momentum has been steady and efforts continue. However, we’ve encountered fallout and unknowns which we hadn’t planned on, and these are of an institutional and political nature

Less Is More: Origins of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Collection Assessment Plan

All academic libraries are undergoing changes in collections and services, with an emphasis on reorganization and assessment. For the first time in decades, the UWSP Albertson Library has started a weeding and collection assessment of our entire STACKS print holdings. Our seven-floor Learning Resource Center has a pending renovation project. We are working to weed the collection so it occupies “less” space, while at the same time striving to enhance the collection so that it provides “more” expansive densities and is up-to-date, addressing campuswide curricula changes and needs associated with program growth. This paper highlights numerous “less is more” perspectives. LESS: Physical Stacks, Print item numbers; Duplicate and multiple copies; Unused/outdated/irrelevant holdings. MORE: Space for other services and stakeholders; New technologies; Student retention; Consortia sharing, “One system, one library initiative;” Modernized Collection Development Policy; Currency of collection; Core Collection allocation fund; First Year Program allocation; e-books (firm & DDA-YBP); Compliance with National bibliographies and ACRL; Library outreach and audience interaction; Faculty interaction (“just say no”); and Global impact on literacy \u3e discards \u3e Partnership with Better World Books (http://www.betterworldbooks.com/) and Wisconsin/Nicaragua Partners of the Americas, Inc. (http://www.wisnic.org/). Four-point e-system collection assessment: Bowker Book Analysis System (BBAS): Resources for College Libraries (RCL); Books in Print (BIP); ShelfLister for inventory/usage. Assessment of assessment: How did we do? How much did we remove? Faculty input surprises? LibGuide for Collection assessment project (http://libraryguides.uwsp.edu/c

Reason Minus Zero/No Limit: Trying to Bring It Back Home

Negotiations connected with database renewals are sharply critical and ultimately impact renewal decisions. Today, academic libraries face an ever-consolidating marketplace, often accompanied by disruptive cost increases that toss sound reasoning aside. Instances of super-exponential cost increases transfigure once reasonable practices based on sound criteria to unsustainable subscriptions and inappropriate access models. Most troubling is that libraries have seldom been asked to participate in stakeholder discussions before these models and decisions were made. The paper reviews University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Libraries struggle with these changing metrics. In context, the paper looks at how recent political upheaval in Wisconsin has overturned Wisconsin’s progressive heritage and contributed to a rapid dismantling of state funding for public higher education and its’ associated services. Wisconsin has been known as a ‘laboratory for democracy’ with its’ Wisconsin Idea, publicly championing higher education’s mission and expertise in service of the common good. Times are changing. Today, not only does Wisconsin’s public higher education confront losses of state funding, it faces changing demographics, reduced FTE’s, all equating to even less budget dollars. In turn, budget shortfalls have made it nearly impossible to address declining infrastructures, needs for academic program reorganization and institutional restructuring, much less maintain and enhance existing services

The Impact of Competition on the Interconnection Industry

One of the most critical problems facing the telecommunications industry is the extent to which competition will be introduced into what has been, for the most part, a regulated industry. In the forefront of the competitive environment has been the telephone interconnection industry. The genesis of this industry was the Carterfone decision by the Federal Communications Commission which allowed competition in the interconnection field. It is the thesis of this project that the most significant factor affecting the telephone interconnection industry today is the continued impact of competition on the industry. To insure that the project stayed within manageable limits the authors chose to examine the issues dealing with that part of the interconnect industry providing for the connection of answering devices, acoustic couplers, personal custom telephones, intercom systems, key business systems, or private branch exchanges (PBX) to the telephone system. Issues surrounding the competitive interconnect services of microwave and satellite links provided by the specialized common carriers are beyond the scope of this project. The specialized common carrier area is a critical issue on its own right and should be the subject of investigation by future participants in the Telecommunications Program. An analysis of present, past and potential interconnect manufacturers is provided to show how the lure and promise of competition has affected the industry. Because there are hundreds of companies involved in the manufacture and marketing of interconnect devices, only a limited cross section has been chosen for this project

Using WSDM and Web Service Ping for QoS based Web Service Selection

By using the standard Web Service Distributed Management (WSDM) and Web Service Ping, we introduce a lightweight solution to the Web Service QoS problem. The Management of Web Services (MOWS) part of WSDM is used to publish Web Service's QoS parameters. Management using Web Services (MUWS), the second part of WSDM, is used to monitor IT resources' QoS. Examples are server's QoS, application server's QoS and network's QoS. Web Service Ping can be used as a simple diagnostic tool for Web Service's latency and Web Service's availability across organizational boundaries. Therefore, we propose to introduce a standardized Web Service Ping operation into all Web Services. All QoS data retrieved by using MOWS, MUWS and Web Service Ping, can be used for Web Service selection. We introduced a new Web Service selection architecture, the Delegation Web Service as selector. Compared to Web Service Broker as selector, consumer as selector and QoS enhanced UDDI as selector, the Delegation Web Service as selector offers a better solution for implementing Web Service load balancing and can increase the security of and for Web Services

Predicting code comprehension: a novel approach to align human gaze with code using deep neural networks

The better the code quality and the less complex the code, the easier it is for software developers to comprehend and evolve it. Yet, how do we best detect quality concerns in the code? Existing measures to assess code quality, such as McCabe’s cyclomatic complexity, are decades old and neglect the human aspect. Research has shown that considering how a developer reads and experiences the code can be an indicator of its quality. In our research, we built on these insights and designed, trained, and evaluated the first deep neural network that aligns a developer’s eye gaze with the code tokens the developer looks at to predict code comprehension and perceived difficulty. To train and analyze our approach, we performed an experiment in which 27 participants worked on a range of 16 short code comprehension tasks while we collected fine-grained gaze data using an eye tracker. The results of our evaluation show that our deep neural sequence model that integrates both the human gaze and the stimulus code, can predict (a) code comprehension and (b) the perceived code difficulty significantly better than current state-of-the-art reference methods. We also show that aligning human gaze with code leads to better performance than models that rely solely on either code or human gaze. We discuss potential applications and propose future work to build better human-inclusive code evaluation systems