Apply Small Teaching Tactics in an Introductory Programming Course: Impact on Learning Performance

Small teaching approaches are well-structured, incremental teaching improvement techniques supported by research in cognitive science, memory, and learning. I systematically implement a series of small teaching activities in an introductory programming course to tackle the teaching and learning challenges faced by instructors and students. The small teaching activities are designed to promote effective learning strategies such as knowledge retrieval, spacing-out practice, and interleaving learning. I examine the impact of such approaches on students’ performance through comparative analyses. The test results indicate that small teaching approaches are effective in improving students’ lower- and higher-level thinking skills and help boost students’ long-term knowledge retention. Because the small teaching approaches are flexible and easy to implement, instructors teaching technical information systems topics can quickly integrate at least some small teaching activities into their classes

Optimal Design of Consumer Review Systems

Consumer review systems have become an important marketing communication tool through which consumers share and learn product information. This paper aims to analyze the review system design as firms’ strategic decision to facilitate consumer sharing and learning about their products. We show that firms’ optimal pricing and review system design decisions critically depend on contextual characteristics including product quality, product popularity, and consumer misfit cost. Our results suggest that firms choose a low rating scale for niche products and a high rating scale for popular products. Different pricing strategies should be deployed during the initial sale period for different product types. For niche products, firms are advised to adopt lower-bound pricing for high-quality products to take advantage of the positive word-of-mouth. For popular products, firms are advised to adopt upper-bound pricing for high-quality products to enjoy the direct profit from the initial sale without damaging the product review outcomes

Quality of User-Reported Data in Health Virtual Community

User-reported data are used in medical research and to support healthcare operations. However, the quality of user-reported data presents a major challenge. This paper is interested in investigating the data quality issues in HVC and possible causes and improvement

Scalable solution coating of the absorber for perovskite solar cells

Perovskite-based solar cell technology has advanced significantly and the power conversion efficiencies are nowadays on par with commercialized photovoltaic technologies. To realize the potential of perovskite solar cells, the focus is now shifting to scalable fabrication technologies that will enable low-cost solution processing of perovskite solar cells over large areas and with high yields. This review article discusses the fundamental concerns that arise when transitioning from laboratory to large area solution coating, available scalable coating technologies, and their applicability to the fabrication of high-performance perovskite solar cells. We find that a significant amount of work has been done to test scalable coating technologies, but also that often the methods that led to highest-performing cells in the laboratory (e.g. antisolvent processing) show limited compatibility with scalable coating methods. To achieve a high-yield and low-cost process, development must emphasize a high degree of control provided by sequential conversion of perovskite films and engineering of additives that fine-tune coating properties of perovskite precursor inks

Switched Stackelberg game analysis of false data injection attacks on networked control systems

summary:This paper is concerned with a security problem for a discrete-time linear networked control system of switched dynamics. The control sequence generated by a remotely located controller is transmitted over a vulnerable communication network, where the control input may be corrupted by false data injection attacks launched by a malicious adversary. Two partially conflicted cost functions are constructed as the quantitative guidelines for both the controller and the attacker, after which a switched Stackelberg game framework is proposed to analyze the interdependent decision-making processes. A receding-horizon switched Stackelberg strategy for the controller is derived subsequently, which, together with the corresponding best response of the attacker, constitutes the switched Stackelberg equilibrium. Furthermore, the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system under the switched Stackelberg equilibrium is guaranteed if the switching signal exhibits a certain average dwell time. Finally, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in this paper