402 research outputs found
Toward a Quantitative Analysis of Online Communities
In flexible learning environments there has been an increased focus on developing resources that promote and facilitate the emergence of online communities. The formation of, and active participation in, a learning community has been suggested to facilitate the learning process (Rovai, 2002; Palloff & Pratt, 1999). Current literature examining the formation and development of online communities has predominantly centred on the qualitative analysis of posted messages (within an asynchronous discussion forum) as evidence for community attainment and sustainment (Brook & Oliver, 2003; Hew & Cheung, 2003). The search for key words and phrases is conducted regardless of timing and position within the threaded discussion. Hence, analysis of the postings often occurs in a manner that de-contextualises the discourse throughout the delivery of a subject (Misanchuk & Dueber, 2001). Furthermore, as analysis is limited to a few disparate units of study, an overall picture of the extent to which the online communities formed in individual units are supporting the strategic goals of the university is not formed. Investment in online technologies and development of learning and teaching strategies is conducted at an enterprise level. However, current methodologies evaluating the development and sustainment of online communities have been focussed at a localised level. This paper proposes a scaleable quantitative approach to identify the degree of learner interactions occurring in specific subject-based forums for further qualitative analysis. It is proposed that the examination of data derived from the wider University context better positions and informs staff undertaking subject-based forums in order to align with University strategic goals
Effects of Gender by Athletic and Music-Based Performing Arts Participation on Academic Performance
The purpose of this study was to explore the possible academic effects of student participation in athletics and music-based performing arts. In pursuit of academic excellence, district school boards and administrators must carefully allocate the district’s fiscal resources to maximize available funds. If student participation in athletics and music-based performing arts indicate a link to increased academic outcomes, then eliminating these programs to reduce budget concerns may not be the best choice. Five hypotheses were considered using data from four rural Arkansas high schools to determine if any effects by gender, of student participation in athletics or music-based performing arts on academic outcomes as measured by GPA and ACT composite scores existed. While results from this study found both higher mean GPA and ACT scores existed for students who participated in athletics and music than for nonparticipating students, there was no statistical interaction between the variables in each hypothesis; thus, insufficient evidence existed to reject the null for all hypotheses in the study. Next, the main effects were analyzed for each hypothesis. Again, no statistical significance for the main effects was found
Party Competition as a Driver of Foreign Policy: Explaining Changes in the British Labour Party’s Immigration Policies and the Turkish AKP’s Approach to Cyprus
This paper explores how party competition influences states’ foreign policy choices. I argue that party competition has stronger explanatory power than it is often given credit for. To examine this dynamic, I discuss some alternative explanations of policy choices, then examine two cases studies and finally discuss implications that can be drawn from those case studies. The two case studies that will be analyzed are the British Labour government’s decision in 1999 to pass stricter immigration controls and the Turkish AKP government’s decision in 2006 to adopt a more hardline approach with regards to Cyprus. These two case studies have been chosen because many of the other variables that are often advanced as explaining policy choices would have predicted a different choice than was actually made. If party competition can override these concerns, then its explanatory power can be asserted with greater confidence
Optimizing Batch Linear Queries under Exact and Approximate Differential Privacy
Differential privacy is a promising privacy-preserving paradigm for
statistical query processing over sensitive data. It works by injecting random
noise into each query result, such that it is provably hard for the adversary
to infer the presence or absence of any individual record from the published
noisy results. The main objective in differentially private query processing is
to maximize the accuracy of the query results, while satisfying the privacy
guarantees. Previous work, notably \cite{LHR+10}, has suggested that with an
appropriate strategy, processing a batch of correlated queries as a whole
achieves considerably higher accuracy than answering them individually.
However, to our knowledge there is currently no practical solution to find such
a strategy for an arbitrary query batch; existing methods either return
strategies of poor quality (often worse than naive methods) or require
prohibitively expensive computations for even moderately large domains.
Motivated by this, we propose low-rank mechanism (LRM), the first practical
differentially private technique for answering batch linear queries with high
accuracy. LRM works for both exact (i.e., -) and approximate (i.e.,
(, )-) differential privacy definitions. We derive the
utility guarantees of LRM, and provide guidance on how to set the privacy
parameters given the user's utility expectation. Extensive experiments using
real data demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms
state-of-the-art query processing solutions under differential privacy, by
large margins.Comment: ACM Transactions on Database Systems (ACM TODS). arXiv admin note:
text overlap with arXiv:1212.230
Astrobiology Research & Outreach at Truman State University
We present light curves for three potential exoplanet candidates: TIC 950525831.01 and TIC 346015394.01. These targets were chosen from the TESS Follow-Up Observing Program (TFOP) database1. The primary goal of the TESS Follow-up Observing Program (TFOP) Working Group (WG) is to provide follow-up observations that will facilitate achievement of the Level One Science Requirement to measure masses for 50 transiting planets smaller than 4 Earth radii2. Students remotely used the 1-m NPOI Lowell telescope on Anderson Mesa near Flagstaff, Arizona to target these objects. In total, students observed eight “TFOP” potential exoplanet targets. Students are working on analyzing data and generating light curves on several of these objects and have completed and submitted analyses on three objects we discuss here
HiTrust: building cross-organizational trust relationship based on a hybrid negotiation tree
Small-world phenomena have been observed in existing peer-to-peer (P2P) networks which has proved useful in the design of P2P file-sharing systems. Most studies of constructing small world behaviours on P2P are based on the concept of clustering peer nodes into groups, communities, or clusters. However, managing additional multilayer topology increases maintenance overhead, especially in highly dynamic environments. In this paper, we present Social-like P2P systems (Social-P2Ps) for object discovery by self-managing P2P topology with human tactics in social networks. In Social-P2Ps, queries are routed intelligently even with limited cached knowledge and node connections. Unlike community-based P2P file-sharing systems, we do not intend to create and maintain peer groups or communities consciously. In contrast, each node connects to other peer nodes with the same interests spontaneously by the result of daily searches
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