1,114 research outputs found

    Facing the Future: the Changing Shape of Academic Skills Support at Bournemouth University

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    This paper explores the potential impact of changes to higher education in England on student expectations, engagement, lifestyles and diversity, and outlines implications for the development of digital literacy within academic skills support at Bournemouth University (BU). We will investigate how tackling resource constraints with organisational change can also enable efficient, centralised provision of support materials that utilise networks to overcome the risk of fragmented support for digital literacy. We will also look at how changing delivery modes for support can accommodate changing student lifestyles whilst tackling a weakness of centralised support for digital literacy: that it can become detached from the student’s subject-focused academic practice. Finally we will explore how involving students in developing support can help us to face changes to student expectations and engagement whilst ensuring that materials are authentic and speak to learners in their own voice

    Life of occam-Pi

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    This paper considers some questions prompted by a brief review of the history of computing. Why is programming so hard? Why is concurrency considered an “advanced” subject? What’s the matter with Objects? Where did all the Maths go? In searching for answers, the paper looks at some concerns over fundamental ideas within object orientation (as represented by modern programming languages), before focussing on the concurrency model of communicating processes and its particular expression in the occam family of languages. In that focus, it looks at the history of occam, its underlying philosophy (Ockham’s Razor), its semantic foundation on Hoare’s CSP, its principles of process oriented design and its development over almost three decades into occam-? (which blends in the concurrency dynamics of Milner’s ?-calculus). Also presented will be an urgent need for rationalisation – occam-? is an experiment that has demonstrated significant results, but now needs time to be spent on careful review and implementing the conclusions of that review. Finally, the future is considered. In particular, is there a future

    Communicating Haskell Processes: Composable Explicit Concurrency Using Monads

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    Writing concurrent programs in languages that lack explicit support for concurrency can often be awkward and difficult. Haskell's monads provide a way to explicitly specify sequence and effects in a functional language, and monadic combinators allow composition of monadic actions, for example via parallelism and choice two core aspects of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). We show how the use of these combinators, and being able to express processes as first-class types (monadic actions) allow for easy and elegant programming of process-oriented concurrency in a new CSP library for Haskell: Communicating Haskell Processes

    Maximizing Research Impact Through Institutional and National Open-Access Self-Archiving Mandates

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    No research institution can afford all the journals its researchers may need, so all articles are losing research impact (usage and citations). Articles made “Open Access,” (OA) by self-archiving them on the web are cited twice as much, but only 15% of articles are being spontaneously self-archived. The only institutions approaching 100% self-archiving are those that mandate it. Surveys show that 95% of authors will comply with a self-archiving mandate; the actual expe-rience of institutions with mandates has confirmed this. What institutions and funders need to mandate is that (1) immediately upon acceptance for publication, (2) the author’s final draft must be (3) deposited into the Institutional Repository. Only the depositing needs to be mandated; set-ting access privileges to the full-text as either OA or Restricted Access (RA) can be left up to the author. For articles published in the 93% of journals that have already endorsed self-archiving, access can be set as OA immediately; for the remaining 7%, authors can email the eprint in re-sponse to individual email requests automatically forwarded by the Repository

    Dissimilarity is used as evidence of category membership in multidimensional perceptual categorization: a test of the similarity-dissimilarity generalized context model

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    In exemplar models of categorization, the similarity between an exemplar and category members constitutes evidence that the exemplar belongs to the category. We test the possibility that the dissimilarity to members of competing categories also contributes to this evidence. Data were collected from two 2-dimensional perceptual categorization experiments, one with lines varying in orientation and length and the other with coloured patches varying in saturation and brightness. Model fits of the similarity-dissimilarity generalized context model were used to compare a model where only similarity was used with a model where both similarity and dissimilarity were used. For the majority of participants the similarity-dissimilarity model provided both a significantly better fit and better generalization, suggesting that people do also use dissimilarity as evidence

    Relating and Visualising CSP, VCR and Structural Traces

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    As well as being a useful tool for formal reasoning, a trace can provide insight into a concurrent program's behaviour, especially for the purposes of run-time analysis and debugging. Long-running programs tend to produce large traces which can be difficult to comprehend and visualise. We examine the relationship between three types of traces (CSP, VCR and Structural), establish an ordering and describe methods for conversion between the trace types. Structural traces preserve the structure of composition and reveal the repetition of individual processes, and are thus well-suited to visualisation. We introduce the Starving Philosophers to motivate the value of structural traces for reasoning about behaviour not easily predicted from a program's specification. A remaining challenge is to integrate structural traces into a more formal setting, such as the Unifying Theories of Programming – however, structural traces do provide a useful framework for analysing large systems

    Millisecond accuracy video display using OpenGL under Linux

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    To measure people’s reaction times to the nearest millisecond, it is necessary to know exactly when a stimulus is displayed. This article describes how to display stimuli with millisecond accuracy on a normal CRT monitor, using a PC running Linux. A simple C program is presented to illustrate how this may be done within X Windows using the OpenGL rendering system. A test of this system is reported that demonstrates that stimuli may be consistently displayed with millisecond accuracy. An algorithm is presented that allows the exact time of stimulus presentation to be deduced, even if there are relatively large errors in measuring the display time

    Hearing Faces and Seeing Voices: The Integration and Interaction of Face and Voice Processing

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    Cognitive understanding of voice recognition has borrowed much from the area of face processing, both in terms of the theoretical framework within which results are interpreted, and the methodology used to assess performance. A considerable body of research now exists to suggest that voice recognition may proceed in parallel with face recognition, and that the two pathways may combine to inform person recognition. However, rather than being independent or equivalent, these parallel pathways appear to interact to reveal interesting interference effects. The present paper reviews a series of studies that focus on a considerable and growing literature. The vulnerability of voice processing will be explored relative to face processing, and the interaction of these two pathways will be examined with reference to broader theoretical frameworks for person recognition

    Coos River Basin fish management plan

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    prepared by Linda J. Wagoner, Kim K. Jones, Reese E. Bender, Jerry A. Butler, Darrell E. Demory, Thomas F. Gaumer, Joel A. Hurtado, William G. Mullarkey, Paul E. Reimers, Neil T. Richmond, Thomas J. Rumreich.This archived document is maintained by the State Library of Oregon as part of the Oregon Documents Depository Program. It is for informational purposes and may not be suitable for legal purposes.Includes bibliographical references (pages 122-124).Mode of access: Internet from the Oregon Government Publications Collection.Text in English

    The Total Synthesis of Dragmacidins D and F

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    The dragmacidins are an emerging class of bis(indole) natural products isolated from deep-water marine organisms. Although there has been a substantial effort to prepare the simple piperazine dragmacidins, little synthetic work has been done in the area of the pyrazinone-containing family members, dragmacidins D, E, and F. These compounds are particularly interesting due to their complex structures and broad range of biological activity. A highly convergent strategy to access dragmacidin D has been developed. In this approach, sequential halogen-selective Suzuki couplings were used to assemble the carbon scaffold of the natural product. After executing a highly optimized sequence of final events, the first completed total synthesis of dragmacidin D was achieved. An enantiodivergent strategy for the total chemical synthesis of both (+)- and (-)-dragmacidin F from a single enantiomer of quinic acid has been developed and successfully implemented. Although unique, the synthetic routes to these antipodes share a number of key features, including novel reductive isomerization reactions, Pd(II)-mediated oxidative carbocyclization reactions, halogen-selective Suzuki couplings, and high-yielding late-stage Neber rearrangements. The formal total syntheses of dragmacidin B, trans-dragmacidin C, and dihydrohamacanthin A are described. In addition, preliminary studies involving a novel approach for the preparation of dragmacidin E are reported.</p
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