Open online courses attract a diverse global audience of learners, many of whom might not be self-directed autodidacts with the necessary web competencies to reap the full benefits of such courses. Most of these learners would benefit from increased guidance on how to use MOOCs to enhance their learning. One potential area for guidance is in group collaboration where learners form teams to coll...

More and more product development projects involve geographically distributed groups of developers. One major problem among the members of such groups is the long term lack of awareness of the activities in remote sites. In this paper we discuss the importance of awareness in distributed product development projects. We argue that generic services are needed in development environments in order...

Big data analytics on geographically distributed datasets (across data centers or clusters) has been attracting increasing interests in both academia and industry, posing significant complications for system and algorithm design. In this article, we systematically investigate the geo-distributed big-data analytics framework by analyzing the fine-grained paradigm and the key design principles. W...

To improve the performance of geographically distributed cosimulation, we propose a concept called hierarchically grouped message. The concept improves cosimulation performance, preserving the cosimulation accuracy, by hierarchically grouping messages transferred between simulators in a short period of simulated time into a single physical message, thereby reducing the number of physical messag...

We identify the issues that are important in design of a geographically distributed Web crawler. The identified issues are discussed from a “benefit” and “challenge” point of view. More specifically, we focus on the effect of geographical locality of Web sites on crawling performance, and, as a practical study, investigate the feasibility of a distributed crawler in terms of network costs. For ...

Recent research observations of small group meetings have identified factors critical to the design of computer tools supporting real time collaborative design . In particular, group activity revolves as much around the design process-sketching, annotating, listing ideas, and gesturing around a communal work surface-as it does around the resulting drawing artifact. A workstation-based tool call...

We describe PNUTS, a massively parallel and geographically distributed database system for Yahoo!’s web applications. PNUTS provides data storage organized as hashed or ordered tables, low latency for large numbers of concurrent requests including updates and queries, and novel per-record consistency guarantees. It is a hosted, centrally managed, and geographically distributed service, and util...

laudakia nupta, with numerous local populations through iran, is one of the most widely distributed species of the genus laudakia in iran. eight hundred and fifty nine bp of mitochondrial nd4-trnaleu were sequenced and analyzed for 47 specimens of laudakia nupta and three specimens of laudakia melanura, as an out-group taxon. all specimens were collected during field work in iran. based on bran...

Throughout evolution the brain has mastered the art of processing real-world inputs through networks of interlinked spiking neurons. Synapses have emerged as key elements that, owing to their plasticity, are merging neuron-to-neuron signalling with memory storage and computation. Electronics has made important steps in emulating neurons through neuromorphic circuits and synapses with nanoscale ...