Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) at Peerless Technologies

Peerless Technologies is an award-winning 8(a), small disadvantaged business (SDB) located in Fairborn, Ohio, whose primary focus is on government defense contracts. It has customers ranging from the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security and others in the government sector. Peerless currently has approximately 60 employees. More than half of these employees work at various locations while the remaining employees work at Peerless’ corporate headquarters in Fairborn, Ohio

Practicing Learner-Centered Teaching: Pedagogical Design and Assessment of a Second Life Project

Guided by the principles of learner-centered teaching methodology, a Second Life project is designed to engage students in active learning of virtual commerce through hands-on experiences and teamwork in a virtual environment. More importantly, an assessment framework is proposed to evaluate the learning objectives and learning process of the Second Life project. The assessment framework is composed of a variety of items, such as reflection essays, chat transcripts, peer evaluations, and a post project survey that measures the learning motive, attitudes, level of difficulty, and the time used to complete the project. The Second Life project was implemented in an MBA-IS course in which thirty-two students were randomly assigned to eight teams. In Second Life, each team managed an avatar and completed a series of business-related activities. The assessment outcomes indicated that students were able to apply what they learned in class into the virtual environment through their exploration and interaction. Students were motivated to learn in the Second Life project and felt that the engaging experiences helped with their learning. On average, students developed a positive attitude toward Second Life and felt that the application was not difficult to use. Lessons learned, recommendations for design issues, and implications for educators are also discussed

Exploring a Third-Party e-Waste Recycling System under the Extended Producer Responsibility Framework in China

The rapid advance of information technologies has produced a large amount of waste of electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE). WEEE or e- waste, refers to old, end-of-life (EoL) or discarded electronic appliances. The world produces 20 to 50 million metric tons of e-waste annually (Electronics Take-back Coalition 2009), of which China alone contributes 2 million tons. Each year at least 6 million washing machines, 7 million TV sets, 10 million PCs and 70 million mobile phones are discarded and the number increases at the rate of more than 10 per cent each year (Hung 2007), according to the report from the resource and environment comprehensive utilization department of the State Development and Reform Commission (SDRC 2006). Discarded electronic products contain a stew of toxic metals and chemicals such as lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and polychlorinated biphenyls (Scott 2007) and cause great harm to the environment. Recycling and reusing e-waste are thus becoming an increasingly important global issue

Quantum tomography as normalization of incompatible observations

Quantum states are successfully reconstructed using the maximum likelihood estimation on the subspace where the measured projectors reproduce the identity operator. Reconstruction corresponds to normalization of incompatible observations. The proposed approach handles the noisy data corresponding to realistic incomplete observation with finite resolution.Comment: RevTeX, 4 pages, 3 figure

Orthography influences spoken word production in blocked cyclic naming

Does the way a word is written influence its spoken production? Previous studies suggest that orthography is involved only when the orthographic representation is highly relevant during speaking (e.g., in reading-aloud tasks). To address this issue, we carried out two experiments using the blocked cyclic picture-naming paradigm. In both experiments, participants were asked to name pictures repeatedly in orthographically homogeneous or heterogeneous blocks. In the naming task, the written form was not shown; however, the radical of the first character overlapped between the four pictures in this block type. A facilitative orthographic effect was found when picture names shared part of their written forms, compared with the heterogeneous condition. This facilitative effect was independent of the position of orthographic overlap (i.e., the left, the lower, or the outer part of the character). These findings strongly suggest that orthography can influence speaking even when it is not highly relevant (i.e., during picture naming) and the orthographic effect is less likely to be attributed to strategic preparation

Maximum likelihood estimation of photon number distribution from homodyne statistics

We present a method for reconstructing the photon number distribution from the homodyne statistics based on maximization of the likelihood function derived from the exact statistical description of a homodyne experiment. This method incorporates in a natural way the physical constraints on the reconstructed quantities, and the compensation for the nonunit detection efficiency.Comment: 3 pages REVTeX. Final version, to appear in Phys. Rev. A as a Brief Repor

The role of prosody in the identification of Persian sentence types: declarative or wh-question?

Language Use in Past and Presen

Do Persian native speakers prosodically mark wh-in-situ questions?

It has been shown that prosody contributes to the contrast between declarativity and interro- gativity, notably in interrogative utterances lacking lexico-syntactic features of interrogativity. Accordingly, it may be proposed that prosody plays a role in marking wh-in-situ questions in which the interrogativity feature (the wh-phrase) does not move to sentence-initial position, as, for example, in Persian. This paper examines whether prosody distinguishes Persian wh-in- situ questions from declaratives in the absence of the interrogativity feature in the sentence- initial position. To answer this question, a production experiment was designed in which wh- questions and declaratives were elicited from Persian native speakers. On the basis of the results of previous studies, we hypothesize that prosodic features mark wh-in-situ questions as opposed to declaratives at both the local (pre- and post-wh part) and global level (complete sentence). The results of the current study confirm our hypothesis that prosodic correlates mark the pre- wh part as well as the complete sentence in wh-in-situ questions. The results support theoretical concepts such as the frequency code, the universal dichotomous association between relaxation and declarativity on the one hand and tension and interrogativity on the other, the relation between prosody and pragmatics, and the relation between prosody and encoding and decoding of sentence type.Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Acoustics correlates of Persian in-situ-wh-questions

Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Modifying the Cu(111) Shockley surface state by Au alloying

The deposition of submonolayer amounts of Au onto Cu(111) results in a Au-Cu surface alloy with temperature- and thickness-dependent stoichiometry. Upon alloying, the characteristic Shockley state of Cu(111) is modified, shifting to 0.53 eV binding energy for a particular surface Au2Cu concentration, which is a very high binding energy for a noble-metal surface. Based on a phase accumulation model analysis, we discuss how this unusually large shift is likely reflecting an effective increase in the topmost layer thickness of the order of, but smaller than, the value expected from the moiré undulation. © 2012 American Physical Society.This work was supported in part by the Spanish MINECO (Grants No. MAT2010-21156-C03-01 and No. MAT2010-21156-C03-03), and the Basque Government (Grant No. IT-257-07). The SRC is funded by the National Science Foundation (Award No. DMR-0084402).Peer Reviewe