Investigation and Research on the Development Level of Primary School Students' Information Literacy in Western China and its Development Strategy

In this study, the current situation of information literacy level of primary school students in western China, mainly in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, was investigated by Means of questionnaire and interview. The survey results show that there is a big gap between urban and rural primary school students' information literacy level, mainly because rural schools do not enjoy good resource allocation. In addition, it is found that there is no significant difference in information literacy level between genders, but there are still some gender stereotypes. On the whole, students' information literacy level is at a medium level, and information technology use behavior is mostly at a low level, while high-level behavior is less. The information literacy of primary school students in western China still needs further development

Power frequency interference and suppression in measurement of power transmission tower grounding resistance

“If you want peace, work for justice.” – Pope Paul VI This paper explores how the children’s right to be heard is implemented in the criminal proceedings in Romania and Norway. The judicial practices in the two countries are analysed in relation to four elements identified in the literature as relevant to the child’s right to be heard- space, voice, audience and influence. The two juvenile justice systems are then compared to each other, as well as to international best practices, with the final aim of identifying small-scale measures worth disseminating in Romania and Norway to strengthen the effectiveness of child’s right to be heard. The paper argues that a more effective implementation of the children’s right to be heard strengthen all the array of the children’s rights, makes the juvenile justice system more child-friendly and facilitates the transition from conflict and punitive justice towards positive peace. Keywords: right of the child to be heard, juvenile justice, children’s rights, child-friendly justic

Reconciling Semantic Heterogeneity in Web Services Composition

Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is a popular computing paradigm for the development of distributed Web applications. Service composition, a key element of SOC, is severely hampered by various types of semantic heterogeneity among the services. In this paper, we address the various semantic differences from the context perspective and use a lightweight ontology to describe the concepts and their specializations. Atomic conversions between the contexts are implemented using XPath functions and external services. The correspondences between the syntactic service descriptions and the semantic concepts are established using a flexible, standard-compliant mechanism. Given the naive BPEL composition ignoring semantic differences, our reconciliation approach can automatically determine and reconcile the semantic differences. The mediated BPEL composition incorporates necessary conversions to convert the data exchanged between different services. Our solution has the desirable properties (e.g., adaptability, extensibility and scalability) and can significantly alleviate the reconciliation efforts for Web services composition.This work was partially supported by the MIT Sloan China Management Education Project and grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 60674080 and No. 60704027) and the National High-Tech R&D (863) Plan of China (No. 2007AA04Z150)

Fairness in Graph Mining: A Survey

Graph mining algorithms have been playing a significant role in myriad fields over the years. However, despite their promising performance on various graph analytical tasks, most of these algorithms lack fairness considerations. As a consequence, they could lead to discrimination towards certain populations when exploited in human-centered applications. Recently, algorithmic fairness has been extensively studied in graph-based applications. In contrast to algorithmic fairness on independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data, fairness in graph mining has exclusive backgrounds, taxonomies, and fulfilling techniques. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction of existing literature under the context of fair graph mining. Specifically, we propose a novel taxonomy of fairness notions on graphs, which sheds light on their connections and differences. We further present an organized summary of existing techniques that promote fairness in graph mining. Finally, we summarize the widely used datasets in this emerging research field and provide insights on current research challenges and open questions, aiming at encouraging cross-breeding ideas and further advances

Case Study of Teacher Training for Project STEM Course

Educators are paying more attention to students' hands-on ability with critical thinking which has not been emphasized in previous Chinese education system. To fill this gap, there is a need to organize a hands-on workshop to develop teachers’ STEM hands-on skills to promote on high school campus. Therefore, the purposes of this study are: 1. exploring the development status of teachers' hands-on ability after ending the workshop and 2. exploring the effectiveness of the project-based STEM training with interdisciplinary concept content compared with the traditional STEM training. Based on the two-day teacher training of STEM workshop, this paper used Flanders interaction analysis which is an observation technique used to record and analyze the process and impact of teacher-student interaction in the classroom. Through the analysis, we found that the learners were active in this training course, the interaction between teachers and learners was very frequent, and the relationship between them was quite consistent (harmonious). Then we inferred the training effect of the teachers in the training by combining the works or results submitted by the learners after the workshop. The error rate of these exercises or results was low, indicating that peer discussion or group discussion played an important role in the process of practice. Compared with the traditional iFIAS method, it can be found that in the training based on the project-based teaching model, learners' advanced cognitive abilities such as analysis and synthesis were developed, and their knowledge transfer ability was more flexible, which was also a reflection of interdisciplinary ability

Reconciling Protocol Mismatches of Web Services by Using Mediators

In the era of Global Services, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been gaining momentum for building Web-based information systems. Service composition is one of the key objectives for adopting SOA. Unfortunately, Web services are not always exactly compatible and it is a non-trivial task to address the mismatches between them. To this end, an approach based on mediator patterns is proposed to develop mediators for reconciling protocol mismatches of partially compatible services and mediating them together. A heuristic technique is developed for identifying protocol mismatches and selecting appropriate patterns. The main steps of the reconciliation approach are presented.The work is partially supported by the MIT Sloan China Management Education Project