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The use of unproctored Internet-based testing (IBT) for personality assessment is increasingly popular, especially in personnel selection. Previous studies on its equivalence to traditional proctored paper-and-pencil testing (PPT) have used between-subjects designs, which makes it difficult to separate intergroup effects from format effects, and have shown mixed results. The aim of the present study was to assess the quantitative, qualitative, and auxiliary equivalence of unproctored IBT and proctored PPT of personality, using a within-sample design. Undergraduate students ( n = 407) completed both an Internet and a paper-and-pencil version of a measure of the Big Five, with a 1 to 3 week interval. The proctored paper-and-pencil assessment was completed in class and the unproctored Internet assessment was completed at the time and place chosen by the participants. Results showed effect sizes for mean differences to vary from null to small. Skewness and kurtosis indices, reliability coefficients, intercorrelations magnitudes, as well as factor solutions, were highly similar across formats. Respondents did not prefer IBT over PPT on a series of statement about their perceptions and reactions to IBT. In conclusion, results suggest that IBT and PPT of the Big Five personality traits are equivalent, and that the data obtained are comparable across formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, the authors compare the costs of online student ratings of instruction with those of paper-based systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Northwestern University's experience sheds light on some of the common (mis)perceptions about online student evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on how surgeons can avoid rejection for submitting their first paper for publication at the "ANZ Journal of Surgery." Topics include the common problems faced by authors, the importance of peer review process in assessing, accepting, or rejecting submitted paper, and the resources that offer practical tips for intending authors like Wiley website located at www.wiley.com and the journal's website located at www.anzjsurg.com.

Interceptors are an emerging middleware technology enabling the addition of specific network-oriented capabilities to distributed applications. By exploiting interceptors, developers can register code within interception points, extending the basic middleware mechanisms with specific functionality, e.g. authentication, flow control, caching, etc. Notably, these extensions can be achieved without modifying either the application or the middleware code. In this paper we report the results of our experiences with CORBA request portable interceptors. In particular, we point out (i) the basic mechanisms implementable by these interceptors, i.e. request redirection and piggybacking and (ii) we analyze their limitations. We then propose a proxy-based technique to overcome the interceptors' limitations. Successively, we present a performance analysis carried out on three Java-CORBA platforms currently implementing the portable interceptors specification. Finally, we conclude our work with a case study in which portable interceptors are used to implement the fault-tolerant CORBA client invocation semantic without impacting on the client application code and on the CORBA ORB. We also release fragments of Java code for implementing the described techniques. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call for papers on several topics including video abstracts, online articles, and comments on abstracts is presented.

This paper presents a combination of verification and conformance testing techniques to support the formal validation of reactive systems. The idea is to use symbolic test selection techniques to extract subgraphs (components) from a specification, and to perform the verification on the components rather than on the whole specification. Under reasonable sufficient conditions, this constitutes a sound compositional verification technique, in the sense that a property verified on the components also holds on the whole specification. This may considerably reduce the global verification effort. Moreover, once verified, a component forms the basis of an adequate test case, i.e. when executed on an implementation, it will not issue false positive or negative verdicts with respect to the verified properties. The approach has been implemented using the STG test selection tool and the PVS theorem prover. It is demonstrated here on a smart-card application: the Common Electronic Purse System. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces current research that focuses on the role of qualitative research in social media including the new ways of marketing promotion, participation, and interaction enabled by social media. The articles included in this special issue of Psychology & Marketing were selected from papers submitted to the 6th Global Innovation and Knowledge Academy (GIKA) conference held in March 2016 in Valencia, Spain. This paper provides a brief synthesis of the contributions of these articles to understanding social media's impact on the ability of organizations to better engage with and market to customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers announcements for April 2007 concerning the American Finance Association, publishers of the periodical "The Journal of Finance." Topics of discussion include the results of the organization's 2006 elections, in which Jeremy Stein was voted president-elect and Darrell Duffie was voted vice president, and information regarding the 2008 annual meeting, to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana in January. The article also offers computer network resource information for further announcements, and offers information on the organization's worldwide directory of finance faculty.

There is continuous debate on the role of digital media tools in art and design Higher Education, and in particular their potential contribution towards teaching and learning. The related literature indicates that there is a dichotomy between digital and traditional tools. This study investigates the views of a cohort of art and design students who undertook a specific instructional task, but instead of using paper and pencil, they used iPads. It is claimed that this computer tablet has considerable potential to enhance teaching and learning, and this study sought to investigate this claim. Inductive qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the interviews provided by 32 ( n = 32) students. Based on the categories that emerged from the analysis of interviews, and within the parameters of this study, the main inference is that the relationship between digital and traditional tools can be better understood as complementary rather than as a dichotomy. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article lists the books including "Adaptive Management of Social-Ecological Systems" and "Presidents and the American Environment," and websites including Drought Risk Atlas located at http://droughtatlas.unl.edu.

The article offers information on a website located at Academia.edu for academics in the U.S. to share research papers.

The article offers information on the awards to be presented by the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) on their annual meeting in the U.S. in 2008. Inlcuded are NCME Award for Career Contributions to Educational Measurement, Jason Millman Promising Measurement Scholar Award Description and Application Procedure and Bradley Hanson Award for Contributions to Educational Measurement. Key information about the description of the award, nomination and application procedure is further presented. A website and email address were also provided for additional information.

Co-occurrence matrices, such as cocitation, coword, and colink matrices, have been used widely in the information sciences. However, confusion and controversy have hindered the proper statistical analysis of these data. The underlying problem, in our opinion, involved understanding the nature of various types of matrices. This article discusses the difference between a symmetrical cocitation matrix and an asymmetrical citation matrix as well as the appropriate statistical techniques that can be applied to each of these matrices, respectively. Similarity measures (such as the Pearson correlation coefficient or the cosine) should not be applied to the symmetrical cocitation matrix but can be applied to the asymmetrical citation matrix to derive the proximity matrix. The argument is illustrated with examples. The study then extends the application of co-occurrence matrices to the Web environment, in which the nature of the available data and thus data collection methods are different from those of traditional databases such as the Science Citation Index. A set of data collected with the Google Scholar search engine is analyzed by using both the traditional methods of multivariate analysis and the new visualization software Pajek, which is based on social network analysis and graph theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the World Wide Web becomes an integral part of higher education, universities must determine the viability of using the Internet for their student evaluation systems. This chapter highlights important online-student-rating issues raised in this volume and in other research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information pertaining to the periodical, its parent body, the American Finance Association, and the publisher, Blackwell Publishing. Most importantly, contact information is provided along with computer network resources, information regarding potential advertisements, and a listing of articles that appear in the current issue. The article also discusses prizes awarded by the American Finance Association for research papers, including the Smith-Breeden Prizes for 2006 and the Brattle Awards for 2007.

Electronic voting entered the political arena some years ago, with some countries advocating its use, some countries trialling and then abandoning it and yet others preferring to preserve the status quo of paper-and-pencil voting within a voting booth. In this paper we present the pros and cons of electronic voting and propose a set of characteristics we think electronic voting systems should exhibit. We then briefly review some pertinent concerns, issues and worries. We conclude by introducing the Handivote system, an electronic voting system that supports voting by means of SMS messaging, and explain how it measures up in terms of our own specified characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of the digital age on the work life of academics and reports research on how and whether technologies are facilitating and adapting the teaching and research practices of academics, offering a description of scholarship for the digital age. A changed landscape is emerging, which offers academics new ways of working in research and new kinds of academic output for them to use in their teaching. Two areas are considered: the conduct of research (in particular the range of activities associated with publication and dissemination of research findings) and the conduct of teaching. The links between these practices are explored in terms of a revised view of scholarship, the perspective of digital scholarship. The paper begins with a review of literature and draws on an interview study to illustrate changes in academic practice, both for teaching and research. The study of 22 academics with expertise in educational technology provides a commentary on the changes, identifying open access as important in both teaching and publication. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future work in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People recommenders are a widespread feature of social networking sites and educational social learning platforms alike. However, when these systems are used to extend learners' Personal Learning Networks, they often fall short of providing recommendations of learning value to their users. This paper proposes a design of a people recommender based on content-based user profiles, and a matching method based on dissimilarity therein. It presents the results of an experiment conducted with curators of the content curation site Scoop.it!, where curators rated personalized recommendations for contacts. The study showed that matching dissimilarity of interpretations of shared interests is more successful in providing positive experiences of breakdown for the curator than is matching on similarity. The main conclusion of this paper is that people recommenders should aim to trigger constructive experiences of breakdown for their users, as the prospect and potential of such experiences encourage learners to connect to their recommended peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of this paper is to describe the development of an interactive application that can be used in teaching English as a second language using children's stories in mobile devices. The aim of this experimental study has been to find out the potential of using the developed interactive mobile application in improving the learning skills such as vocabulary, pronunciation, listening and comprehension of the learners of the English language without the help of a teacher. The novelty of the research in this paper has been the use of a speech recognition engine on the mobile phone to identify spoken words of the learner in an attempt to teach correct pronunciation of words. The learning is interactive and it takes place entirely on a mobile phone. In this experimental study 37 voluntary students have participated. A Pre-Test and a Post-Test have been performed to find out the learning abilities of students. The results of the experimental study clearly indicated that English learning skills of young students had higher statistically significant improvements as a result of using the developed application in the experimental group. It can be concluded that the developed mobile application can be used as an educational tool in teaching English as a second language. Young students who may be interested in improving their listening, vocabulary, comprehension and pronunciation skills while learning English as a second language should find this mobile application enjoyable and useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the improvement in digital mapping technologies and their accessibility, a great potential for the mapping of new things is emerging, as is the case with literary mapping. Drawing from a manifold theoretical framework, this article aims to involve readers from different fields of study in the complexity of literary cartography in the digital era. Starting from recent studies regarding the relationships between literature and cartography and from the ontogenetic turn in map studies, the article examines digital literary mapping projects where cartographic representations are produced by readers as analytical tools and/or as reading practices for literary texts. In order to uncover the trends of literary mappings, the paper focuses on three different processes/elements of the practice: projects' processes of data collection, the tools used to map out texts, and the developers of the projects. Beyond involving the reader with the state of this practice, the paper aims at providing hints for future literary mapping practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the travel industry, electronic word of mouth (eWOM) elicits a major influence on consumers' decision making. Travel retailers are facing the new challenges derived from the different nature of their competitors-big hypermarkets, for instance, are extending their brands to travel services-and the challenges derived from online comments that consumers have access to. With a sample of 263 tourists, and using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis data analysis, this paper shows how the selection between a specialized travel agency and a private label (PL) agency is influenced by five factors: the usefulness attached to online reviews by users and the valence of those online reviews, attitude and experience with PL, and the individual's value consciousness. The contribution of this paper not only comes from the novelty of considering PL in the context of travel agencies, but also from using a relatively novel data analysis approach useful for analyzing management issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the production technology facing computerized credit unions in Canada. A full system of translog cost equations is estimated in order to test for economies of scale, economies of scope, and other production characteristics in a multiproduct context. The regression results indicate that most of the credit unions in our sample experience significant increasing returns to scale as they expand their level of output. There is also evidence of cost complementarity or economies of scope in their mortgage and other lending activities. As a result, legislation which limits the ability of credit unions to grow and diversify will likely raise the operating costs of this important group of financial institutions. Additional structural tests of the most general translog specification suggest that none of the restrictive production conditions commonly imposed by other researchers using Cobb-Douglas and CES specifications provide a valid representation of credit union technology. The results of many earlier studies are therefore open to question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Literature for a systematic review on the student experience of e-learning is located across a range of subject areas including health, education, social science, library and information science. Objectives: To assess the merits and shortcomings of using different search techniques in retrieval of evidence in the social science literature. Methods: A conventional subject search was undertaken as the principal method of identifying the literature for the review. Four supplementary search methods were used including citation searching, reference list checking, contact with experts and pearl growing. Results: The conventional subject search identified 30 of 41 included references; retrieved from 10 different databases. References were missed by this method and a further 11 references were identified via citation searching, reference list checking and contact with experts. Pearl growing was suspended as the nominated pearls were dispersed across numerous databases, with no single database indexing more than four pearls. Conclusions: Searching within the social sciences literature requires careful consideration. Conventional subject searching identified the majority of references, but additional search techniques were essential and located further high quality references. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO) was launched in October 2007 and, in this first phase, digitally published several thousand of Twain's letters, almost 100 facsimiles of original documents, and over 28,000 records of other correspondence. The partners involved in the building of MTPO – the Mark Twain Papers, the California Digital Library, and University of California Press – created the site on the premise that Web-accessible versions of this content, enhanced by innovative design and site architecture and a suite of research tools, would greatly improve scholars' ability to discover and work with this unique material. Anecdotal feedback supports this premise. Early data analysis confirms the usefulness of facsimiles and browsing functionality. Users tend to prefer simple keyword over complex searches; however, those conducting advanced searches are using the tool flexibly, as we had hoped. Further analysis is expected to improve our understanding of how researchers use these tools in combination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: One of the key aspects of improving the dental care we offer to our patients is in basing our practice on the best available evidence. Aim: The main purpose of this paper is to present some basic ways of searching reliable papers on Internet and to introduce some techniques to facilitate the development of strategic search skill to improve the quality of dental care, using dental trauma as an example. Materials and methods: After formulation of a clinical question on a dental trauma issue, a comparison was made between: data collected in PubMed using a given term; data collected in PubMed using the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary (Mesh) and data collected using the principles of evidence-based research, all by an independent researcher. A number of papers searched about a clinical question on dental trauma and a brief commentary about each Internet research database is presented. The authors reported that the best sites available to perform the sample search were those produced by academic centers, professional organizations and government-sponsored. To get evidence-based clinical papers we did internet search on PubMed, Cochrane, Center of Evidence-Based Dentistry and Knowledge Finder using the clinical question “Emergency Treatment for Avulsed Tooth”. Results: All searched databases were efficient for scientific journals, but when we used the PI strategy, the search seemed to be more relevant and specific. The Cochrane, Center of Evidence-Based Dentistry and Knowledge Finder presented more reliable papers to answer our clinical question about dental trauma treatment. Conclusion: It is imperative that dentists understand the advantages of searching the Internet and learning to use it effectively to guide practice and assist their patients in their pursuit for better oral health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, Japanese researchers conducting social surveys encounter several difficulties such as restricted access to official registers and a decrease in current response rates. These researchers may expect these difficulties to be solved by the survey techniques or methods developed outside Japan, such as computer-assisted interviews (CAI) and Internet surveys. It is unclear whether the numerous technical differences between survey methodologies developed in Japan and elsewhere imply the backward-ness of Japan or cultural differences. This paper discusses the potential of various recent survey methods, focusing on the culture and paradigms in Japan and the UnitedStates. First, this paper presents an overview of survey techniques, such as computer-assisted personal interviewing, Internet surveys, and mixed modes. Second, it points out the fact that the existence of the registers and different survey concepts might have created the different survey paradigms. In addition, reference is made to the linguisticdifferences between the US and Japan. The results indicate that survey research is more dispersed in Japan than in the US and that survey research adapted to the uniqueness of Japanese culture is not accumulated sufficiently, although such an accumulation is required. Finally, it is stated that not only surveys, but also the concept of methodology, is not very popular in Japan. Furthermore, the development of survey research in the US is likely to be related to pragmatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Internet has changed the work of academic researchers and addresses the question of how expanded Internet usage has affected Journal of Risk and Insurance ( JRI) and Journal of Finance ( JF) articles, including the shift to empirical research, joint authorship, and new authorship. Internet availability significantly increased joint authorship overall (more for JF than for JRI), shifting upwards a strong secular trend toward working with other researchers. Another big impact of the Internet has been to increase the number of new authors (more for JRI than for JF). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multifractal nature of traffic volume is known to have significant influence to queuing behavior in network nodes. In the Internet, TCP traffic, which is the major traffic flowing through the Internet has been reported to have multifractal nature. To control the effect of the multifractal nature, the origin of the multifractal nature in TCP traffic needs to be explained. However, it is still unclear what part of TCP control mostly affects the multifractal nature. In this paper, we focus on TCP congestion control from the viewpoint of multifractal nature of generated traffic. We investigate “what component of TCP congestion control mechanism affects multifractal nature of generated traffic?” Our simulation results show that Retransmission Time-Out mechanism plays an important role for multifractal nature of TCP traffic. In addition, our results show that avoiding occurrence of Retransmission Time Out is the best approach to improve TCP performance, i.e., throughput degradation, LRD, and multifractal nature. Random Early Detection (RED), based on the fact that Retransmission Time Out should be avoided, to improve TCP performance are also reasonable from the viewpoint of LRD and multifractal nature. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 90(1): 68–76, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.20277 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, several online tools have appeared capable of identifying potential plagiarism in science. While such tools may help to maintain or even increase the originality and ethical quality of the scientific literature, no apparent consensus exists among editors on the degree of plagiarism or self-plagiarism necessary to reject or retract manuscripts. In this study, two entire volumes of published original papers and reviews from Basic & Clinical Pharmacology & Toxicology were retrospectively scanned for similarity in anonymized form using iThenticate software to explore measures to predictively identify true plagiarism and self-plagiarism and to potentially provide guidelines for future screening of incoming manuscripts. Several filters were applied, all of which appeared to lower the noise from irrelevant hits. The main conclusions were that plagiarism software offers a unique opportunity to screen for plagiarism easily but also that it has to be employed with caution as automated or uncritical use is far too unreliable to allow a fair basis for judging the degree of plagiarism in a manuscript. This remains the job of senior editors. Whereas a few cases of self-plagiarism that would not likely have been accepted with today's guidelines were indeed identified, no cases of fraud or serious plagiarism were found. Potential guidelines are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the special section in electronic human resource management (eHRM) research. One of the topics discussed is the concentration of eHRM system examination on the process of implementation, the process related to adoption of the technology and efficacy of various software applications during the 1990s. Common themes in special issues on eHRM are also mentioned including the value of eHRM, the notion of antecedents and consequences of eHRM and evidence-based research.

This paper presents a Learning-based Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (LB-NMPC) algorithm to achieve high-performance path tracking in challenging off-road terrain through learning. The LB-NMPC algorithm uses a simple a priori vehicle model and a learned disturbance model. Disturbances are modeled as a Gaussian process (GP) as a function of system state, input, and other relevant variables. The GP is updated based on experience collected during previous trials. Localization for the controller is provided by an onboard, visionbased mapping and navigation system enabling operation in large-scale, GPS-denied environments. The paper presents experimental results including over 3 km of travel by three significantly different robot platforms with masses ranging from 50 to 600 kg and at speeds ranging from 0.35 to 1.2 m/s (associated video at http://tiny.cc/RoverLearnsDisturbances). Planned speeds are generated by a novel experience-based speed scheduler that balances overall travel time, path-tracking errors, and localization reliability. The results show that the controller can start from a generic a priori vehicle model and subsequently learn to reduce vehicle- and trajectory-specific path-tracking errors based on experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network function virtualization and software-defined networking allow services consisting of virtual network functions to be designed and implemented with great flexibility by facilitating automatic deployments, migrations, and reconfigurations for services and their components. For extended flexibility, we go beyond seeing services as a fixed chain of functions. We define the service structure in a flexible way that enables changing the order of functions in case the functionality of the service is not influenced by this and propose a YANG data model for expressing this flexibility. Flexible structures allow the network orchestration system to choose the optimal composition of service components that, for example, gives the best results for placement of services in the network. When number of flexible services and number of components in each service increase, combinatorial explosion limits the practical use of this flexibility. In this paper, we describe a selection heuristic that gives a Pareto set of the possible compositions of a service as well as possible combinations of different services, with respect to different optimization objectives. Moreover, we present a heuristic algorithm for placement of a combination of services, which aims at placing service components along shortest paths that have enough capacity for accommodating the services. By applying these solutions, we show that allowing flexibility in the service structure is feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are promising hardware security primitives suitable for protecting resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we propose to use multiple-valued logic (MVL) for implementing hardware-efficient PUF integrated circuits. We show that by extracting device mismatch in either current-mode or voltage-mode MVL comparators, the proposed PUF circuits can generate unique and reliable chip identifiers. In order to stabilize PUF responses, we utilize multiple thresholds of MVL comparators, whose outputs are selected and combined according to the sensed temperature. To reduce power and further enhance reliability, the PUF circuits are biased in the weak-inversion region. Evaluation results show that the proposed MVL-PUFs are unique and reliable over a wide temperature range. In addition, they significantly improve the energy efficiency of the state-of-the-art PUFs. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the number of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud offers in the market increases, selecting an appropriate configuration of cloud resources for a given application becomes a non-trivial task even for experienced developers. Because cloud resources are relatively cheap, usually charged by the hour, developers could systematically evaluate the performance of their application using different resource types from different cloud providers, thus allowing them to accurately identify the best providers and resource types for their application. However, conducting systematic performance tests in multiple IaaS clouds may require a significant amount of planning and configuration effort from application developers. This paper presents Cloud Crawler, a declarative environment for specifying and conducting application performance tests in IaaS clouds. The environment includes a novel declarative domain-specific language, Crawl, by means of which cloud users can describe, at a high abstraction level, a large variety of performance evaluation scenarios for a given application, and a scenario execution engine, Crawler, which automatically configures, executes, and collects the results of the scenarios described in Crawl. The paper also reports on how Cloud Crawler has been successfully used to systematically test the performance of two open-source web applications in public IaaS clouds. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asynchronous online discussion environments are important platforms to support learning. Research suggests, however, threaded forums, one of the most popular asynchronous discussion environments, do not often foster productive online discussions naturally. This paper explores how certain properties of threaded forums have affected or constrained the quality of discussions, and argues that developing alternative discussion environments is highly needed to offer better support for asynchronous online communication. Using the Productive Online Discussion Model developed by Gao, Wang and Sun, we analyzed current work on four types of asynchronous discussion environments that have been developed and researched: constrained environments, visualized environments, anchored environments and combined environments. The paper has implications for developing future asynchronous online discussion environments. More specifically, future work should aim at (1) exploring new environments that support varied goals of learning, (2) integrating emerging technologies to address the constraints of current environments, (3) designing multifunctional environments to facilitate complex learning and (4) developing appropriate instructional activities and strategies for these environments. Practitioner Notes What is already known about this topic Asynchronous online discussion plays an important role in facilitating learning., It is hard to foster a focused, interactive and in-depth asynchronous discussion in traditional threaded forums., Researchers have investigated multiple ways of structuring or facilitating asynchronous online discussions., What this paper adds The paper analyzes how existing features of threaded forums constrain the quality of online discussion., The paper identifies the progress made in designing alternative asynchronous discussion environments and discusses four major types of asynchronous discussion environments that have been developed and researched., The paper provides suggestions for developing future asynchronous discussion environments., Implications for practice and/or policy Designing alternative asynchronous discussion environments is necessary to improve the quality of online discussion and communication., New asynchronous discussion environments need to be designed to meet varied learning goals and facilitate complex learning., Appropriate instructional strategies need to be developed for both existing and new online discussion environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One-way delay variation (OWDV) has become increasingly of interest to researchers as a way to evaluate network state and service quality, especially for real-time and streaming services such as voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) and video. Many schemes for OWDV measurement require clock synchronization through the global-positioning system (GPS) or network time protocol. In clock-synchronized approaches, the accuracy of OWDV measurement depends on the accuracy of the clock synchronization. GPS provides highly accurate clock synchronization. However, the deployment of GPS on legacy network equipment might be slow and costly. This paper proposes a method for measuring OWDV that dispenses with clock synchronization. The clock synchronization problem is mainly caused by clock skew. The proposed approach is based on the measurement of inter-packet delay and accumulated OWDV. This paper shows the performance of the proposed scheme via simulations and through experiments in a VoIP network. The presented simulation and measurement results indicate that clock skew can be efficiently measured and removed and that OWDV can be measured without requiring clock synchronization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authentication is an important service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for an unattended environment. Recently, Das proposed a hash-based authentication protocol for WSNs, which provides more security against the masquerade, stolen-verifier, replay, and guessing attacks and avoids the threat which comes with having many logged-in users with the same login-id. In this paper, we point out one security weakness of Das' protocol in mutual authentication for WSN's preservation between users, gateway-node, and sensor nodes. To remedy the problem, this paper provides a secrecy improvement over Das' protocol to ensure that a legal user can exercise a WSN in an insecure environment. Furthermore, by presenting the comparisons of security, computation and communication costs, and performances with the related protocols, the proposed protocol is shown to be suitable for higher security WSNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hirsch's h index is becoming the standard measure of an individual's research accomplishments. The aggregation of individuals' measures is also the basis for global measures at institutional or national levels. To investigate whether the h index can be reliably computed through alternative sources of citation records, the Web of Science (WoS), PsycINFO and Google Scholar (GS) were used to collect citation records for known publications of four Spanish psychologists. Compared with WoS, PsycINFO included a larger percentage of publication records, whereas GS outperformed WoS and PsycINFO in this respect. Compared with WoS, PsycINFO retrieved a larger number of citations in unique areas of psychology, but it retrieved a smaller number of citations in areas that are close to statistics or the neurosciences, whereas GS retrieved the largest numbers of citations in all cases. Incorrect citations were scarce in Wos (0.3%), more prevalent in PsycINFO (1.1%), and overwhelming in GS (16.5%). All platforms retrieved unique citations, the largest set coming from GS. WoS and PsycINFO cover distinct areas of psychology unevenly, thus applying different penalties on the h index of researches working in different fields. Obtaining fair and accurate h indices required the union of citations retrieved by all three platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews available data sources for the study of migration and development through both retrospective and continuous data collection systems. It is argued that much basic data already exists for the study of international migration but that the addition of a relatively small number of simple, although not necessarily cheap measures can be taken to improve existing data. The priority is to generate flow data between countries for recent time periods and the paper makes suggestions how this can be best achieved. The paper goes on to an assessment of the types and availability of data needed to understand better the relationships between migration and development more broadly. Data at several scales, macro and micro, and for a variety of types of migration will be required in order to achieve this objective, particularly if less visible flows, such as those internal to developing countries, or those involving women, are to be better understood. The paper concludes by moving beyond the traditional state-led data-gathering systems to examine the potential for civil society organizations to help in strengthening data and research on migration and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to survey the emerging academic literature on employee performance management (PM) from an international perspective. The primary information source was a search of electronic databases. Two criteria were used to determine which studies to include in the literature survey: (1) those published in an English-language blind refereed academic journal, and (2) those focused on employee PM or performance appraisal (PA) from an international/global perspective. Sixty-four articles, published between 1985 and 2005, met the criteria. A preliminary scheme was developed for classifying the existing academic research into conceptual and empirical articles. The empirical articles were further classified by their foci and themes. In addition to classifying the articles, the paper presents a summary of what can be learned from the major findings of the empirical studies. The major conclusion is that the academic literature on cross-border PM is relatively atheoretical and exploratory in nature and that the design and substance of the research studies are weak. With regard to themes, there are a number of foci in the literature with only scant attention paid to the central concern with the PM of expatriates as expressed by firms. The empirical articles look at the disparate components of PA and are interested mainly in cultural differences as an intervening variable. Several recommendations are presented for researchers to help focus future research on cross-border PM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web-based peer-review systems are ubiquitous within scholarly publishing today, providing valuable efficiencies for authors, editors, and referees. These systems are the result of a general evolution from paper-based workflows to electronic processes that began in the 1970s. DOS-based systems paved the way for Windows desktop systems and, in the mid-1990s, Web-based peer review. Governmental, academic, and commercial stakeholders all participated in advancing the state of peer review by experimenting with different technologies, workflows, and features. These experiments have coalesced into a new steady state in which Web-based peer-review systems are the norm, and in which continued evolution tends to focus on incremental improvements to traditional workflow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is gaining attention among portal developers and vendors to enable easy development, increased richness in functionality, pluggability, and flexibility of deployment. Whilst currently not supporting all WSRP functionalities, open-source portal frameworks could in future use WSRP Consumers to access remote portlets found from a WSRP Producer registry service. This implies that we need a central registry for the remote portlets and a more expressive WSRP Consumer interface to implement the remote portlet functions. This paper reports on an investigation into a new system architecture, which includes a Web Services repository, registry, and client interface. The Web Services repository holds portlets as remote resource producers. A new data structure for expressing remote portlets is found and published by populating a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry. A remote portlet publish and search engine for UDDI has also been developed. Finally, a remote portlet client interface was developed as a Web application. The client interface supports remote portlet features, as well as window status and mode functions. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In object-oriented terms, one of the goals of integration testing is to ensure that messages from objects in one class or component are sent and received in the proper order and have the intended effect on the state of the objects that receive the messages. This research extends an existing single-class testing technique to integration testing of multiple classes. The single-class technique models the behaviour of a single class as a finite state machine, transforms the representation into a data flow graph that explicitly identifies the definitions and uses of each state variable of the class, and then applies conventional data flow testing to produce test case specifications that can be used to test the class. This paper extends those ideas to inter-class testing by developing flow graphs, finding paths between pairs of definitions and uses, detecting some infeasible paths and automatically generating tests for an arbitrary number of classes and components. It introduces flexible representations for message sending and receiving among objects and allows concurrency among any or all classes and components. Data flow graphs are stored in a relational database and database queries are used to gather def-use information. This approach is conceptually simple, mathematically precise, quite powerful and general enough to be used for traditional data flow analysis. This testing approach relies on finite state machines, database modelling and processing techniques and algorithms for analysis and traversal of directed graphs. The paper presents empirical results of the approach applied to an automotive system. This work was prepared by U.S. Government employees as part of their official duties and is, therefore, a work of the U.S. Government and not subject to copyright. Published in 2006 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tutors have only limited time to support the learning process. In this paper, we introduced a model that helps answer the questions of students. The model invoked the knowledge and skills of fellow students, who jointly formed an ad hoc, transient community. The paper situated the model within the context of a Learning Network, a self-organised, distributed system, designed to facilitate lifelong learning in a particular knowledge domain. We discussed the design of the model and explained how we selected and supported capable peers. Finally, we examined the calibration of the model and a simulation, which was intended to verify if the model is fit for use in experiments with students. The results indicate that, indeed, it is possible to identify and support capable peers efficiently and effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are online student ratings the “wave of the future”? This chapter introduces numerous advantages and challenges of adopting an online system for student evaluation of teaching; in it, the authors preview the research of the other authors of this volume and suggest areas that universities can investigate when determining the desirability of initiating an online ratings system for student evaluation of instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares mean ratings, inter-rater reliabilities, and the factor structure of items for online and paper student-rating forms from the University of Washington's Instructional Assessment System. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, the author examines important issues related to online reporting of student survey results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theological education has traditionally required students to come together in real (and often residential) communities and to learn in classroom settings with face–to–face teaching. Until recently, this model alone has been thought to provide the opportunity for the development of personal knowledge and the formation of character necessary for those engaged in professional ministry. This paper outlines a research project on the use of the Web in theological education, using an introductory course in biblical studies, offered for the first time this year in an online environment through the University of Exeter. The course is designed to enable the creation of a virtual community where personal theological formation is fostered. This paper describes the design of the course, analyzing the complex competencies required in terms of goals and outcomes, and identifying issues for further research. It provides some preliminary results, with an eye to making recommendations for future curriculum development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]