1,720,981 research outputs found
Thinking inside and outside the box: a hands-on paper folding activity leading to optimisation problems
No full textThis paper explores the use of hands-on origami activities to enhance mathematics learning in high school and university courses, improving both student engagement and deeper understanding of mathematical topics. We designed an origami-based workshop to address the concept of domain of a function and its behaviour at the boundary of the domain alongside two optimisation problems, emphasising real-world applications and creative problem-solving. By implementing these activities in various courses and contexts, we evaluated their effectiveness using a design-based research methodology
Challenges in Mathematics Learning at the University: An Activity to Motivate Students and Promote Self-awareness
Full text linkMath anxiety is always just around the corner. At the university, it makes students continuously postpone the Calculus exam, leading them into a vicious circle of low confidence and poor performance. To get out of this situation, students need to be motivated and involved. They also need to master metacognitive strategies that can support their learning process. In this paper, we present a digital activity entitled Advent Calendar, focused on storytelling and proposed through the logic of spacing. The aim is to increase students’ motivation and self-awareness, but also to obtain learning analytics useful to monitor progress and solve any possible weaknesses with appropriate feedback. The activity was proposed using the tools offered by the Learning Management System (LMS) Moodle. It was tested in three university courses at two Italian universities, the University of Milan and the Polytechnic University of Turin, with students’ active participation. This participation had a high impact on the results of the final examination. Feedback demonstrated positive feelings and good results in the motivation process, while the analytics showed a continuous approach to the study of mathematics
An e-learning project: E-math
No full textThe aim of this work is to provide a reliable, common base of knowledge about standard mathematical subjects for students that want to enroll at a scientific faculty. To attract students who had some troubles with Mathematics, and with the somewhat boring way to teach it in high school, we adopted a non standard approach. In particular we use games as Memory, Indiana Jones and Tetris. The use of an informal language and comics always support the introduction of the most relevant or difficult topics, which traditionally do not find an enthusiastic welcome by the students
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Weak symmetries of stochastic differential equations driven by semimartingales with jumps
No full textStochastic symmetries and related invariance properties of finite dimensional SDEs driven by general càdlàg semimartingales taking values in Lie groups are defined and investigated. The considered set of SDEs, first introduced by S. Cohen, includes affine and Marcus type SDEs as well as smooth SDEs driven by Lévy processes and iterated random maps. A natural extension to this general setting of reduction and reconstruction theory for symmetric SDEs is provided. Our theorems imply as special cases non trivial invariance results concerning a class of affine iterated random maps as well as (weak) symmetries for numerical schemes (of Euler and Milstein type) for Brownian motion driven SDEs
Random transformations and invariance of semimartingales on Lie groups
No full textInvariance properties of semimartingales on Lie groups under a family of random transformations are defined and investigated, generalizing the random rotations of the Brownian motion. A necessary and sufficient explicit condition characterizing semimartingales with this kind of invariance is given in terms of their stochastic characteristics. Non-trivial examples of symmetric semimartingales are provided and applications of this concept to stochastic analysis are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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